Neerav Kingsland, CEO of New Schools for New Orleans, identifies four “arrows” that could improve the quality of education in the coming decades, the third of which is particularly intriguing:

Unfortunately, international trade and technology will continue to eliminate middle-class jobs. Personally, I’m worried that our political system will not adequately ease the pain of this transition. However, this economic upheaval will increase the quality of human capital available to schools. 

What I appreciate about Neerav’s analysis is that it recognizes that not all good things go together. One challenge K-12 schools face is that, as Josh Barro has observed, the combination of the improvement in the labor market position of female college graduates and the wage compression that been reinforced by unionization has made it more difficult to recruit and retain talented teachers. (Declining student-teacher ratios, which represent both a response to consumer demand and union imperatives, have also played a role in diluting the teacher talent pool.) The first development is clearly a good thing. The second is a good thing for teachers who would have a difficult time finding stimulating and remunerative work in other sectors while being a bad thing for those in a position to do so. The result of combinging this good thing with this somewhat bad thing is that average teacher quality has suffered while other sectors have benefited from talented workers who might have otherwise devoted themselves to educating the next generation. Neerav is suggesting that we might see a reversal of these trends. That is, if the labor market position of college graduates deteriorates as offshoring and increasingly intelligent machines substitute for skilled labor, and if blended learning and other technology-driven strategies allow K-12 schools to make do with fewer teachers, there will be more high-quality workers chasing fewer jobs, and this will prove a boon to average teacher quality and (presumably) educational outcomes. I am more optimistic than Neerav about mid-skill employment opportunities, and so I am more pessimistic about the future trajectory of the teacher talent pool, though probably not by much in either case.