My argument is that people being given a wage below a certain amount is immoral, if that amount keeps them from having basic first world living standards. I never once said that anyone should or should not do specific actions to get to that.
On the contrary, to suggest that paying someone below $35K a year is immoral is to indeed suggest that one must pay them $35K or above in order to be moral. Now you are trying to have it both ways. I have found myself employing 10 people at below your "moral" wage. Is it more moral for me to fire some (or, which is analogous, never hire them in the first place) in order to pay the remainders more?
Your position seems based upon an unwillingness to appreciate the consequences.
My personal approach would be to use social support systems like we have now.
then your personal approach has nothing whatsoever to do with how much employers pay for labor and you should not suggest that they are somehow immoral when they pay for labor what it is worth.
The point being that one does not have to resort to lessez faire economics to show prosperity. I see you conviently ignore australia.
Nobody has Lasseiz Faire economics - the temptation for politicians to promise electorates something for nothing is too powerful. You could just as easily point to the United States, where we keep our most vulnerable populations out of the workforce by pricing them out of the market. As for Australia, in fact, you may be surprised to know that the main reason they are doing so much better than us
is because they are, in fact, closer to lasseiz faire than we are 
Far better than abandoning people, creating an unhappy underclass, and having revolution which is what historically happens whether or not one trots the old line of "you are saying people can't take care of themselves, which you always do".
never did I suggest that we abandon anyone; nor have I trotted out that strawman. There are indeed some who cannot take care of themselves. But a negative income tax supports those people without providing the incentives to make self-destructive decisions, without the marriage penalties, without the welfare cliffs.
Average work better on very large scales, when you are dealing with a population of 30, then you have to get more specific since the swings can get wilder and wilder. Its how math works.
then I'm fine with producing the aggregate off of students' historical performance, which is information that the schools already have, and which they have already put to good effect to catch cheating teachers.
What they need to do is then do a recursion study to find out which specific actions Mr Smith did caused this growth, see how applicable these actions are to other circumstances, and apply where possible.
After an after-action-report, certainly. But in the meantime Mr Smith deserves a pay raise.
Basically, a good six sigma black belt type engineering studies is what you need.
Newt, is that you? :2razz
Once the formula is found, than education will be better.
Perhaps, but I think that your top-down approach will find outself rapidly outpaced by individual effort. The other teachers have only to ask Mr Smith what he did, and then do it themselves, or perhaps innovate on top of his approach to produce even better effects.
There is no need to worry about people when you can build better systems using science.
:doh yeah..... how has that worked out everywhere it's been tried? Really really well, or millions starving to death in the Great Leap Forward?
Wait, I thought it was
your side generally in here arguing that students and teachers weren't cogs in a machine?
True, but its the privacy laws that would need to be changed. I am fine with that for this purpose, but I think it would be an uphill battle with most parents.
Given that the schools already track and have this data, and that this would not entail
releasing any data to the public, I really don't see how you are coming up with that.
I tend to support incentive structures as well. Good studies have been done with results of doing things like giving people a reward to hold and then only taking it away if they fail a task.
There was one explicitly done tying teacher loss-aversion to student performance; I think I posted it in the education forum a while back.
However, here we are talking about financial disencentive to increase ones' productivity, or form a stable family structure.
The ghetto didn't start getting bad until hard drugs were introduced.
we didn't start to see the destruction in family structure and the generational poverty traps until we started paying people to move into them.
