Wow you quoted me :) (I kind of feel embarrassed, its an essay I through together and then basically retracted because it was so thrown together, and Iv'e been to lazy to fix it...)

Some thoughts on what you said:

"Smeder misses the main point, which isn’t identifying
the problem; a gazillion people in the Chronicle of Higher
Education have said virtually the same thing at various
times. The real problem is solving the problem, which
requires changing the incentives that drive professors. "

Your argument is that we need to put the carrot in front of the teachers. Give them incentives to be better teachers. I think this is true. But it only solves part of the problem.

Your solution is analogous to a magazine company giving its sales team commissions in a world where sales teams don't earn commission. Which I agree is smart. In fact I hate it that teachers don't have incentives to be good teachers.

... continuing the magazine company analogy: Yes, I agree sales reps should be paid on commission. However, if the magazine sucks and the company is poorly run fixing the issue with the sales team isn't going to fix the company.

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The point of my essay was to say that the problems with college are out of the hands of teachers. It is an organizational problem. In a magazine company a organization problems would be: The magazine has a bad art department or the main editor sucks at his job. These are issues that correcting the mistake made with the sales team wont fix. Giving the sales team the commission they deserve wont put a high quality magazine in the hands of the public. Sure it will help. The sales team will put pressure on the Art Department to step up their game. But in the end you cant fix the magazine by fixing the how the sales team is paid. My argument is you can't fix college by fixing how we treat teachers. Giving teachers is only part of the solution.

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Giving teachers incentives is needed, but it won't fix college. The organizational level issues with college I stated in my essay are:

- Super Star teachers are not utilized to their full potential.

- Designing a good lesson plan is difficult. Creating fair tests is difficult. (And people act like its not!) It's so difficult I think a team of people using the most recent research on education methods should be doing this not a teacher by himself with microsoft word and power point open. This guy http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2009/09/teaching-linear-algebra... should be helping teachers teach. It is ridiculous that most teachers don't use the education techniques this guy used. And I am sure there are many other education techniques that teachers could be using but don't.

- Students are not given adequate resources to study and collaborate (24 hour study areas, rooms with white boards).

- Peer tutoring programs and study groups are greatly lacking.

- Way to many students don't have the basics down: Writing, Spelling, hand writing, study skills and basic math. The lack of these skills cause many brilliant and creative students to needlessly to do poor in school or worse kicked out. For example I got B's and A's in my Special Relativity and Intro To Quantum Physics class but did poorly in my lab grades because I had bad hand writing, couldn't spell well or use grammar correctly.