Heroes or Just Hard Workers?

Matt Yglesias approvingly cites a recent post from Alex Tabbarok, in which Alex mocks the teacher-as-hero archetype (e.g. Freedom Writers etc.) as unscaleable, and recommends Direct Instruction instead. "The problem," Matt says, "is that it's just not realistic to build an entire system composed of teachers like that." This is a common refrain, particularly among critics of media-darling ed reforms like KIPP and Teach for America.

The problem with this line of reasoning is that we don't need to build an entire system composed of teachers like that. Most American schoolchildren are doing okay, and if they're not, the necessary fixes probably don't require anyone to work 80 hours a week.

What we have is a minority of children, most poor and people of color, being crushed under the twin burdens of impoverished home lives and dysfunctional schools. It may very well be the case that the only way to help them is to put them in very well-run schools full of exceptionally smart, well-trained teachers who put forth extraordinary time and effort. This seems to work, and I'm not aware of too many other models that can say the same.

And it's not at all clear to me why this isn't achievable at scale for most at-risk students. Many of them are in cities, all of which have big law firms and hospitals that absolutely depend on exactly the kind of time- and human capital-intensive model described above. If law and medicine--the two professions against which education is constantly measuring itself, and lamenting its inferior status--can build stable business models that assume a steady influx of super-motivated people in their 20s and 30s, why not education?