WORKING CONDITIONS MATTER. Cold Spring Shops, last week:

I would note further that working conditions matter: higher teacher pay might call forth more teachers, but the supply curve is likely to be more elastic if teachers can be more confident of weeding out the troublemakers in their classroom -- a development that would have a salutary effect on the performance of the universities as well.

Joanne Jacobs, linking to Tipping Point.

Lower class sizes, clean and safe schools, up-to-date materials, and state of the art technology are among the incentives some districts are using to lure personnel to their hard-to-staff schools. While these are important, the single most important incentive for principals and teachers—the one that has the greatest chance of convincing them that they can make a difference in these highly demanding schools—is the promise of membership on a competent and committed team of teachers and administrators.

Then there's Walter Williams (via Dissecting Leftism), seeking efficiencies in weeding out troublemakers.

Educational triage would acknowledge that there are black youngsters who cannot benefit academically no matter how many educational resources are spent on them. They have little or no family support. Their very presence in school, through disruptive and criminal behavior, makes education impossible for others. Spending resources on these youngsters is the educational equivalent of medical practitioners spending resources on disaster victims who'll die even if treated. These youngsters should be removed and not allowed to take resources from and make education impossible for those who do have a chance for academic achievement.

Some might suggest that the idea of educational triage represents a callous lack of concern for students most in need. But would that same argument make sense when there's a terrorist or battlefield disaster? In other words, would it also be seen as callous for doctors not to treat victims most in need -- those who're going to die anyway? Efficiency criterion dictates that resources be allotted to those who can best use the resources as opposed to those who best need it.

By the way, there's another triage category that doctors won't own up to, and that's disaster victims who will survive only if they don't receive medical treatment. The educational equivalent of this category, where education victims are made worse off, is found in programs such as bilingual education and fuzzy math.

Superintendent's note: it is not simply black students who might benefit by triage, or who have been made worse off by fuzzy math and other faddish practices.