Education system design issue

Research says the top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class by over 10% in one single year. Awesome! What are, then, the characteristics of this top quartile?

Very senior teachers? No. Once somebody has taught for 3 years, their teaching quality does not change thereafter.

Maybe teachers with masters degrees? No. According to research, masters degrees have no effect at all in teaching quality.

You might be thinking: the way the pay system works in most countries rewards these two things: seniority and master degrees. What really matters, though, is not any of those. What makes the difference is past performance. Doesn't that make sense? If someone continuously proves s/he is competent at engaging students to learn, s/he will probably have a good performance engaging more students in the future.

Well, classic example of a unintelligent design, which does not see the whole system, does not reinforce desired behaviours and does not naturally create conditions for improvement, i.e. increasing whole classes' performance by 10% every year.

More on Education? Check the provocative TED talk which inspired this post.

What if we carried our trash?

Clearly, one of the most important factors contributing for unsustainability is the scale of everything today: energy production, construction, agriculture and disposing.

Maybe, if we reconnect to the consequences of our own decisions, we would act a little differently. To start with, what if we carried our trash for a week?