It's sad the community votes this insightful when it is obviously off-topic, not insightful. This kind of thing makes Slashdot no better than Digg.

Here is the take from someone familiar with the paper. Quoted without permission, and passed along from hand to hand, so not able to attribute.

It (the paper) ignores the importance of training and skill. The headline misinterprets the original study as the finding concerned a limited number of children.

The usual sort of mainstream media shock-value headline. Unfortunate since it was quoted directly from Eureka Alerts. Sad.

So if you want to claim it applies to your life, go ahead. But don't make claims about general application and for goodness sake, don't use it to justify messing with your own kids lives.

Totally - I are one. ;-) I see it all the time. Stories in the news are off-the-wall sorts of things and Rush Limbaugh's wet dreams. Mostly just crap but some real life problems. In general you can get rid of dummies if you want to. You've got to want to.

I suggest you look first at yourself. Are you the kind of person who reacts well to a lower stress environment by becoming more creative and working harder?

Your argument is fine of you are a conservative economist. But this isn't post-hoc story telling. Schools are directly responsive to you. Now if you are talking about charter schools, I might agree with you. They aren't directly responsive.

There you go! The only thing you *didn't* mention was voting for Jim Inhoffe.

All I need say is look at the many survivalists that represent the far right margins of conservatism. The remark about having a gun collection was unfair of course but who hasn't had an issue with the IRS? Honestly, lots of people. Ask a CPA.

Many people have guns, many people hate the IRS. BUT the things they do aren't motivated by paranoia either.

*scream*

Of course you don't hire PhDs for elementary schools. But many expensive private prep schools hire them. Actually they have a mixture of masters and even some bachelors but the key is subject knowledge in any case.

It didn't occur to me anyone would consider elementary schools. But since you mentioned it, elementary teachers are demonstrably the worst prepared in subject knowledge. Puerto Rico looked at the research quite some time ago and mandated subject knowledge as professional development for all teachers. Strangely, this improved their SAT results after a short time. ;-)

Back to the US - hiring people who understand the reasons for learning certain things, not just that they must be learnt, is key.

And who can't do any of those three? Only incompetent managers who can't figure out which end of a pen to use can't hire and fire.

If we posit management as the problem hiring and firing, what are we left with?

Of course there is plenty of evidence that you get good employees if you pay them more money. Look around and quit listening to think tank FUD. There is absolutely no way of substantiating the article's panic laden assertions. None. Look at yourself in the mirror for goodness sake.

Every high performing private school hires teachers with doctorates. Universities hire people with doctorates. They get paid a lot and because they have tons of knowledge in their subject area they make pretty good teachers. There is plenty of research that says people who know what they are talking about are good teachers. The news is as usual catching and throwing some crap from yet another attempt to distract people from doing what is right.

OMG the educators have been doing it wrong for the last fifty years! ROFL Peolpe who believe that believe their plumber has been putting their pipes in backwards and their electrician has miswired their houses. They have a profound distrust of institutions that may or may not be well-founded. The result of such thinking is what brought about the rise of home schooling. But you gotta understand the majority of home schooling moms are evangelicals whose husbands have big gun collections and think the IRS is out to get them. They may be right, but they aren't you or me.

Now I'm sure that at this point all the slashdot self-educated whingers will come out of the woodwork, but seriously folks, just think about it. The articles are pretty much crap.

Comic Relief at Apple’s Shareholder Meeting article by Chaffin at Mac Observer
Some quotes: "Why are we being inundated with policies that have nothing to do with [Apple as a company]?!?! These people are Socialists and want us to be slaves to the government, GOD DAMNIT!" ... I also wonder if he's the same HP shareholder named Shelton Ehrlich who told a reporter that he didn't think HP's Chairman had done anything wrong by hiring private investigators to spy on company employees.

So now we know they were recruiting engineers, the argument falls flat. Why? They were selected for and because the over-representation of engineering degrees was small to begin with. Sorry, can't remember who did the study.

What idiot reads ZD FUD and thinks it's real? You may as well believe Fox News.

I am yet another computer crap teacher from yet another huge inner-city school. Rather than recount yet another boring and pointless-because-it-is-just-another-personal-experience, I will tell you what a know for certain.

Adoption of computer technology is a personal choice for families because game consoles are now as expensive as cheap computers. Scrounging broken computers and fixing them is not a productive use of your time. They have been commoditized.

Students will have unrestricted Internet access in classrooms whether schools want it or not. Right now, the screens are a bit too small to use for extended periods. But audio and video are pretty much ubiquitous.

The job is to shape student's usage rather than react to it.

I have moved our class management system (Moodle) to a server outside the school firewall. Now the kids have access from home and everybody is a lot happier.

It may be a waste of time to teach students how to use technology in Math class, but it is essential to understand search technology, critical thinking about content, evaluation of sources, and social behavior as much as which buttons to push.

Any school should be able to afford to put in Internet appliances that are fanless, diskless boxes with wireless cards and external power supplies. Why? Because the cost isn't significantly different from a couple of sets of textbooks. The real problem is not a technology problem, it is a people problem. As Negroponte says, OLPC isn't a technology project. The U.S. school system is only very slightly different from others, but not by much.

On one hand you have parents, on the other, the school personnel to convince.

My solution is to provide something attractive that will attract teacher interest first, student interest second, and administrator interest last.