this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2024
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We should just nationalize the schools and their funding, ridding us of thousands of inefficient and expensive local and regional administrations, pay the most highly qualified teachers a higher salary, give teachers the freedom to craft and administer their own curricula, and give students more freedom in their spare time and at school.
Don't worry, radical change is not even on the table with this or any viable administration. I'm just saying how things ought to be.
Not sure about now, but in the 80s, from 7th to 12th grade for me, I attended a federally funded USA school, and our average student tested in the top quartile of state funded schools nationwide.
https://www.dodea.edu/
I understand your approach but you have things mixed up imo.
The shool administration needs to be local to a reasonable degree. It starts with things as simple as predicting schooling demand. Did a new company create 50 jobs in the district? Means probably 20 more kids to come than before anticipated. The state road is in for a major reconstruction? Some kids are not reachable for this school with the bus in reasonable time anymore...
This also goes the other way round. The availability and attractiveness of the schools will affect other local government decisions.
Meanwhile curricula definitely should be standardized and there should be a high level of federal standardization, leaving space to specific local topics like local history, geography and the like.
What makes you prefer standardized curricula, rather than rigorous testing and well supported teachers?
Academic rigor, we will agree, is crucial - constraining how teachers work is, in my view, not.
Against which reference would you test your teachers qualification? I would argue for that you need a standardized expectation of what teachers need to be able to do and therefore you will have a standardized curriculum for teaching teachers how to teach. You will have the same situation for electrical engineers, for doctors, for air traffic controllers...
So for all these people to be able to learn the standardized qualifications necessary to do their jobs reliably they need a standardized higher education. And that standardized higher education needs as standardized main education to build up on.
In my country we have state level curriculums. They are like 90% the same, but for some topics they aren't. This was causing quite a headache for instance in university with maths. Some people already knew some Linear Algebra from high school, others already had imaginary numbers and yet again others had learned their trigonometry with hyperbolic functions instead of the standard sine and cosine for some reasons. Would have been better if the supposedly equivalent diplomas from the different states actually were equivalent.
Yes... through increasing taxes.
I'm really not sure how you imagine making that work. Maybe you're just not all that familiar with what local government does? Because it's usually a lot. For very little pay.
Basing these takes on a book I read about schools a few years ago. The Smartest Kids in the World. Some of it may be outdated or misremembered, but the clear one was how inefficient it is to have this many school districts in America. Overall cost of adminstration has gone up while teacher pay has stagnated.
Gotcha. I misunderstood a bit and thought you were talking about your local council or government representatives vs people like your District Superintendent.
It's been a while since I've taken a look at a local school district's organizational chart so I used the one here.
FWIW I pulled up a 2011 study that shows consolidation of most school districts has already been done to the point of maximum efficiency. It's also extremely detrimental to poor and impoverished districts.
https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/consolidation-schools-districts
Maybe their management shouldn't be consolidated but their funding absolutely should be, into a single country-wide fund. The districts should then be paid an equal amount on a per-student basis.
You might say that this doesn't account for differences in the cost of living between different areas. I say that it's all the better that it doesn't, because if the funding is set such that it is sufficient to fund education in the most expensive areas (and it will be because these areas have the most political power), the relatively increased funding will allow the poorer areas to catch up.
That feels closer to what I was hoping to articulate. We shouldn't be relying on the largesse of the voting homeowner class to fund our schools at a patchwork of levels, we should be dropping aircraft carrier money into schools and creating the most informed electorate in history.
I'm receptive to that. I'm the definition of a layperson, having read one "popular" book on the subject so I only have vague general notions a layer or so deeper than a completely naive person. In any case the main things I feel strongly about are paying teachers more (and paying very well qualified ones very well), giving them the leeway to dictate what they teach and how, and treating students as if they were innocent civilians deserving of respect and support, rather than... How we treat them now.
Hard agree.
I think a good start is more funding for the IRS and hitting the rich harder with taxes.