SILLIEST QUESTION OF THE DAY. The usually sensible Coyote Blog asks, What About Productivity? He questions news reports about a teacher shortage.

I will ignore the fact that the first half of this statement goes entirely unproven, and in fact no evidence that classes are not being taught is offered. My question today is this: Whenever the question of "teacher shortages" is discussed, why is only the salary portion of the equation ever put forward? Why doesn't anyone ever put forward the solution "increase their productivity?"

A shortage does not have to manifest itself in Soviet-style lines of frustrated buyers, it can manifest itself in larger class sizes or in greater teacher turnover. (I don't know what the situation is elsewhere. Something like half of our College of Education graduates who enter teaching leave within five years.) "Why not increase their productivity?" is a silly question because a strategy that makes working conditions even less tenable will move that half-life in the direction of four years. (In higher education, the strategy of treating faculty in all disciplines as if there is a reserve army of unemployed Ph.D.s eager to produce the credit hours of a community college adjunct, the senior theses of a professor at a posh private college, and the research of a future Nobel Laureate is backfiring.)

Some of the comments at the post consider a different dimension of productivity: good teachers follow good students. The districts that have parental involvement and something resembling academic standards tend to succeed at retaining teachers. (Often those districts have richer residents: perhaps there is more to being rich than having more money.) The policy mistake is in expecting schools to accomplish more with less: haven't many businesses learned the hard way that letting much of their institutional memory go and frazzling the people that remained was a recipe for short-term frustration and long term failure?