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Well, for decades we’ve known what doesn’t work, but politicians and their political allies keep the system in place because it pays...them.

In Illinois we’ve got teacher ‘certifications’. So someone with a decade of experience in their craft couldn’t teach it to anyone, until they get a teaching certificate. How much more stupid can the system get?

What is worse is having millions of teachers each trying to ‘innovate’ at the kids’ expense. Attempts to innovate are by definition going to include many failures. The material to be learned in K-12 doesn’t change every year and it doesn’t change from one locale to another. There is no need to constantly reinvent the wheel. Today’s technology lends itself to sharing the best teachers amongst every classroom on that subject. The “Teacher” should be an interactive video game that includes lectures, textbook, video material all presented as needed and in response to the student’s input to frequent pop-up quizzes. Each student could learn at their own pace and explore in more depth than any live body could support with individual attention. The adults physically present in the classroom should be relegated to Aid or Tutor, and not trying to create their own curriculum while setting a pace that is limited by the slowest student in the class.

Also, it should be impossible to “teach to the test” and impossible to cheat on a test. Each student’s test should be created separately so the questions are in a random order and although the entire class has the same 50 questions, those 50 questions were randomly selected at the last minute from a database of thousands of possible questions on that topic. (If somebody can memorize the answers to thousands of questions on that week’s topic, then their effort to cheat will result in them learning something despite themselves.) This way the “teacher” has no idea exactly what questions will be on the test, and the students can’t crib off each other because their neighbor’s test problems are in a different order. This will force the teachers to teach the actual subject matter rather than “teach to the test” and students to learn the subject matter rather than counting on cribbing off somebody else.