The American K-12 school system is expansive, with millions of students attending thousands of schools. And one of the great frustrations of education policy research is that while many interventions appear to be highly effective at small scale, they almost all flop when implemented at the scale that would actually move the needle for the country as a whole. The very existence of this scaling problem suggests that one promising avenue for change is to look at things we are already doing that don’t seem to work, because we could simply stop doing those things.
Suppose America hired only right-handed teachers, but then it turned out that lefties teach just as well.
Repealing the ban on left-handed teachers would be a large-scale intervention that works. Not an intervention that revolutionizes education, but one that makes it a bit easier for principals around the country to fill vacancies without compromising on quality.
Of course, in reality, the United States doesn’t do anything as blatantly stupid as banning left-handed people from teaching in public schools. But emergency measures adopted in many states to recruit additional teachers during the pandemic provide further evidence for something many analysts have long believed: Many of the current teacher training and licensing requirements have no real benefits, and getting rid of a lot of them would save time and money for various stakeholders andexpand the potential supply of teachers, without reducing quality. That doesn’t on its own make schools better, but it does make it easier to do basically anything else, including raising teacher quality, cutting class size, or reallocating money to other priorities like climate control, air quality, and school meals.