Posted on 10/05/2010 4:52:23 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
The parents would be PAYING for it too
There, I fixed it.
Vouchers and then in turn competition, will give government schools and teachers unions a run for their money. That’s why they don’t want vouchers.
The jackass in the Whitehouse nixed the DC voucher program within the first 48 hours of being sworn in.
End at 8th grade.
That is the critical reform. Without that, nothing else will matter.
I would favor scholarships for grades 9 & 10 for all who show interest. I would test for scholarships for grades 11 & 12, with a cutoff at the 75%ile (I presume that no more than 25% of the 16 year-old population are capable of real 11th grade work).
Stopping the lies is the essential, the critical reform. No one with an IQ of 85 should be forced to go to high school. It's cruel.
Second, stop bringing the kids to Mosques and Planned Parenthood. Stop using Al Gore’s movie as “education” etc
I have solved this problem; it’s just that no one is listening to me.
First, no federal anything re Dept. of Education, etc. Everything to the states only.
For the individual state:
A three-year phase-out of all public schools and all public school funds.
Truancy laws for kids during schools hours abolished.
Huge tax write offs for corporations and individuals donating to ANY kind of school. Some state loans for schools set up in disadvantaged areas.
That’s it. Stand back.
All schools will be private. No one is forced to go to school. Parents are responsible for paying for their children’s tuition. PERIOD.
I envision screaming and gnashing of teeth at first.
After the dust settles, I envision this:
Schools become like TVs. The most expensive, biggest models will be unchanged (prep schools that exist now). There will be a lot of middle of the road models, a lot of discount models, and at the bottom will be inferior models like how cathode ray tube TVs can still be found for next to nothing on Craigslist. It will be the MARKET. It takes more money to get better quality. It will encourage the poor to get themselves OUT of being poor so their kids could attend a better school.
Guess what? You have to pay your child’s meal or find a charity. You have to find a way to get your child across town if that is what it takes. Pay for it or you don’t get it. Free government education was originally because you couldn’t learn at home with illiterate parents: now there is the internet. No excuse any more.
In rough communities, there would be schools put together with donations and loans, maybe not with the latest equipment, that nevertheless will not be held by any laws to keep unruly, unwilling kids. Therefore, even in the poorest schools, only the ones who want to be there, would.
I envision the same $25,000 tuitions at the college prep schools, $5000 to $10,000 at the middle class schools, and $500 - $2000 at the cheapest schools.
I envision schools of ALL religions and special groups. I do not care. Let religious Christians, Muslims, Jews, anyone, really, create schools to their own delight. Progressive schools, conservative schools, classical, art-related, ANYTHING. Let the market dictate.
Do you know where the market already dictates education? Check out your next Homeschooling Fair. There are as many models of education as there are homeschooling families. Directors of Private Schools in My Utopia: Do it your way. It would be wonderful to have all these different ways of education, and see which pay out in well-rounded kids who can succeed. It’s all good.
It’s ideal, but with the education power structure out there, how could this ever happen?
They only pay for a small piece of it.
People with no kids, few kids and empty nesters pay the biggest part of the full bill. Utilization is way out of line with bill paying.
Privatize the whole thing and make people think about who is going to pay the kids education bill before the have more then they pay for. And since they are paying their own bills I suspect that some accountability will return to the system.
I don’t think anything so drastic will actually happen.
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Yes, it can happen. In fact I believe that it is happening right now. The long lines of children and parents waiting for lotteries for charter schools and vouchers prove it.
Large seemingly intractable institutions can lose their legitimacy seemingly over night. Some examples: Jim Crow, The fall of the Soviet Union, slavery, monarchies and the American Revolution, The Reformation.
Eliminate the NEA, get rid of teachers unions, get back to BASICS, pay raises based on abilities not tenure and keep government the hell out of schools.
Some Einstein farther up the thread suggested firing all teachers and replacing them those who can really teach. Yeah, brilliant. And how, pray tell, will you persuade those who can (and aren't already) to do this teaching? Most highly-skilled folks would much rather perform their expertise (for a lot more money) than teach (which is why the teaching pool is so shallow now...). And just because someone has a depth of knowledge in a certain field does not mean he can teach (look up the retention numbers for "career-switchers" in your local school district).
The fact is that you could replace every teacher in the US with a clone of Jaime Escalante, and our schools would still fail. Because the children have absorbed the culture of their parents, which is predominantly a culture of entitlement. They expect to be the passive receivers of education... not participants in the process.
Outside of a few extreme cases (i.e. California and the Northeast), most schools in the heartland are teaching fundamentally the same material as they did 30 years ago. But the students have changed. They now see an "A" as their birthright, with little personal effort involved (and actually learning the material that might get them an "A" is completely irrelevant to them... they only care about the grade). And their parents, many of whom are living vicariously through their kids, cannot stand even the slightest innuendo that their child might not be perfect in every way (and you can forget parental support for discipline!).
With such a culture (50 years of liberalism has done its damage well), how could you expect a school to succeed? The only schools that do so are those that a) have strong families and communities of parents who instill traditional American values, or b) schools wherein the school is able to completely drown out the prevailing outside culture and create its own internal culture of success (which takes school boards and administrators with serious guts... see what just happened in DC). Otherwise, the school will eventually become exactly what the prevailing society around it is, and all your clever "reforms" be damned...
Government employee unions must end, especially teachers’ unions. Then federal subsidy and regulation of schools must end. What the states do with their schools is a state issue.It would be better if states would end their involvement in the local schools.
This is the way it is: the more problems the unions can find in public schools, the more teachers they want to hire, which means more union dues. That is the sum game. If schools improve, unions lose their leverage. This thievery could be stopped in its tracks by one simple alteration to the system.
Excellent ideas!
If all government schools were to close down tomorrow,.. yeah!,... there would chaos for a while,...But... Within 3 years parents and the private market would get it figured out.
Also...There is a point where more money will not buy better quality. Fancy prep schools are not necessarily proving better schooling. Prep schools are selling three things:
1) Socially prestigious contacts and contacts that may or may not get the child into an Ivy League university.
2) Country club facilities. For example, golf courses, weight rooms, pristine grounds, horse stables, etc.
3) Education....Ah!...But it is here that more money will not necessarily provide a better education. If money and the qualifications of the teachers were absolutely essential, then homeschoolers would not be graduating from universities at the age of 18 or younger, winning national spelling and geography bees, and scoring, on average, 30 points higher than the government school population.
Finally, with today's wonderful curriculum, education could and should be very inexpensive. The world's finest teachers could video their lectures. High quality one-on-one tutoring is already available around the world through Skype video conferencing. Much of it is coming from India. Sylvan centers could provide proctured exams.
If government schools were abolished, I believe the brick and mortar, Prussian-style, school would soon be as common as horse drawn garbage wagon. In its place would be very small neighborhood one-room schools in the homes of neighbors, tutoring centers, schooling as part of the day care facility offerings, homeschool co-ops, homeowner association provided schools, etc.
A couple of thoughts:
1. Academics have to come first. A big problem with schools is what the military calls mission creep. Too many other things have been added- good and bad things. In either case, they are unnecessary distractions.
2. A change in teacher education. We have too much emphasis on the teacher as nurturer. What is needed are teachers who are focused on academic excellence and achievement, who understand that expectations have to be high in order for the students to be motivated to do their best.
3. A recognition that “all kids can learn” is not the same as “all kids can learn all things.” A lot of effort is wasted in attempts to do the impossible. Some guy with a 70 IQ is probably not college material, for example, and should not be made to take something like algebra.
4. A willingness to enforce order in school. A teacher’s time is often wasted dealing with disruptive students. It is current practice to avoid expelling/suspending students except in the most egregious cases. Currently, many school administrators consider a high number of suspensions to be a bad thing. Frankly, if someone’s behavior is a problem, then give them the boot- boot camp, private school, home school, whatever.
5. A recognition that memorization and rote learning are in fact useful. You have to know facts in order to think about them. Too much emphasis is on the nebulous “critical thinking” exists now. This is impossible to measure with tests- yet no one will admit that.
6. Elimination of the Federal government’s role. A gigantic centralized bureaucracy setting educational policy for the 50 sovereign states is unworkable and undesirable. It is appropriate in our federal system for the state and local governments to handle this matter.
7. More vocational education. Not everyone wants to go to a four year school to pursue some scholarly degree, and not everyone should. Our society needs people who can do things with their hands as much as their heads.
8. The inclusion of this at the back of all education policy:
“The most effectual means of preventing [the perversion of power into tyranny are] to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts which history exhibits, that possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries, they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes.” —Thomas Jefferson: Diffusion of Knowledge Bill, 1779.
My wife has gone back to school to get her education degree (early childhood). She is attending a private Christian college. Even there, she has been taught to teach math by the constructivist NCTM standard and science by “inquiry methods” which were first championed by John Dewey. These are the current fads and the basis for most state standards for these subjects. Both are horrible - how a kid ever learns anything being taught like that, I don’t know. The teacher is a “facilitator” rather than a teacher and kids pretty much teach themselves. They learn to do graphs and stack blocks but learn little about math or science.
Simple answer ... get the unions and the government out of them.
In order to understand *why* Achilles2000 and others say, 'forget it', you must first understand the real reason we have this abomination of 'public education' today. It was lifted wholesale, from Prussia just at the end of the 19th century, for an express purpose, and said purpose was most definitely *not* to educate, but to indoctrinate. At this it has been remarkably effective, much to the detriment of our body civic.
There is no way in H-ll we should even desire to keep this around, in any fashion. Its very premise is anathema to well-informed, well-educated (and I mean a true education, where one is taught *how* to think, and never *what* to think), and moral citizenry. Its very purpose is to turn potential citizens into mindless drones, slaving for a state of hereditary aristocrats (and if you think that's not the plan, explain, if you will, or can, such things as the Kennedy, Bush, Clinton, and Biden 'dynasties')
In short, 'public education' is nothing more than 'serf school'...
the infowarrior
Improve them by shutting them down!
"Education by government" was just fine, as long as the "government" was the local school board, elected by and responsible to the people whose children attend the schools (and their fellow citizens).
The problems started when the higher levels of government felt that they had to "get into the picture" to "make things better".....when, in actual fact, they made things worse, as they could not and cannot understand all the strictly local issues that can make for successful schools.
End all "desegregation/integration" policies, and set up schools on a STRICTLY neighborhood basis by geographical area. Have each such area governed by a local board, elected solely by people living in that area, with the power to hire and fire, and membership election with term limits (eight years maximum). Things will VERY QUICKLY get fixed.
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