Key & Peele teacher draft in real life and the benefits of socio-political gridlock

Back in high school, I watched a lot of Key and Peele. One of my favorite skits was “If We Treated Teachers Like Pro Athletes” (the video below).

Even though this is a joke, this seems to me like a low-key intriguing idea that seems unexplored. In theory, since public schools are all government-controlled, we already have a big central organization that regulates the hiring and rules of the “league” (public elementary and secondary education).

The hiring process for teachers in public schools is similar to that of most industries; applicants search for their positions and submit applications for those spots. Drafts on the other hand are incredibly different. The choice is taken out of the hands of the applicant (the teachers in this case or the players in the case of sports drafts) for the most part - other than simply refusing to cooperate or expressing interest in a specific hirer beforehand - and the decision making is put into the hands of the hirers. Schools still have the choice in the current system to hire who they want, but they cannot control who applies for the positions that need filling. A draft system would enable schools to target specific individuals in particular growth areas. As a summary, the effects of implementing a draft would be

• More equity across schools in teaching quality
• Ability to enhance particular areas in need of improvement with targeted bids
• Shift of social/cultural perception of teachers

There is no free lunch, and I also thought of a couple of costs to this draft model:

• Good teachers can only do so much to help the quality of underfunded schools
• Teachers do not get as much agency to act according to their preferences
• More money is required to compensate teachers appropriately

I wanted to be a bit more quantitative and build out some sort of comparative model where I look at equilibrium in a free hiring model and equilibrium under a draft market model of how much it would cost schools, but to be honest, I simply don’t have the time or mental capacity for that this weekend.

All this speaks to a larger movement to fix the education system that calls for putting more social value in the teaching profession to attract more good teachers. Fixes related to calls for systemic changes in societal values, though easy in practice, are quite difficult to bring about. Each of the social niches is so entrenched in its own culture that a large, all-encompassing social movement is hard to come by and requires a monumental force of social engineering that causes such as fixing the education system - although quite agreed upon that it is an issue - currently don’t have the right powerful people backing it to bring about concrete change.

Speaking of powerful people and politics, I wanted to take a right turn and talk about something that occurred to me while reading Ken Liu’s The Perfect Match (the more of his short stories I read, the more I realized shows like Black Mirror and Love, Death, and Robots take inspiration from and even use in the case of Good Hunting).

It is quite difficult to watch the news or even just live your normal life in the US and not become frustrated with the fact that the sociopolitical views of various groups in the US are so antagonistically polarized. It’s an emotion that I periodically feel and a sentiment echoed across many of my peers. Recently, however, after reading Ken Liu’s The Perfect Match, I’ve thought about the issue differently.

To summarize the book, it’s a typical dystopian story of a company that grows so large that they imbue themselves into every part of your life and monitor you so much that they have stored a data version of yourself. Even though I’ve consumed a lot of media like this, this time I was especially reflective about the reality of this situation.

Would something that crazy ever be able to happen in real life? Sure, there are small signs of privacy concerns amongst all the tech giants, but for some reason, I just had this underlying belief that something like that would not happen in real life.

I think of the public hearings against Zuckerberg and TikTok’s CEO Shou Zi Chew. It was clear how distrustful some politicians were about technology and how many others echoed the same concern.

It hit me then that for a company to grow that out of control feels like it requires uniform support of it, and the socio-political divide of today makes it such that even if one side were to provide staunch support, the other side would be in staunch opposition. Even on both sides, we have so much entertainment showing how things can spiral out of control that I can now sit here typing this out without much worry that these scenarios will come to be.

I’ve always abstractly understood the need for diversity of thoughts and opinions, but I’ve always felt like this leads to gridlock and halts progress. It’s only now that I’m able to appreciate a concrete example of a substantial positive reason for moving slowly amongst all the cons.