Government education won’t be stopped from the top, but people can stop using it.
How about we stop giving condoms to 9 year olds and telling them how they can have sex with anything that moves and if it feels good, do it.
Padlocks.
Make it private.
on in-service days, of course.
Break the union! And if that doesn’t work, burn them to the ground and let the kids learn at home.
That one is a winner for sure! Fire the teachers and rent out the buildings to those who can really educate our children.
How Do We Improve the Public Schools?
Bulldozer?
Abolish the concept of tenure.
Here are the things necessary to save US Public Schools:
1. Break the unions that have a stranglehold on any educational progress for students
2. Engage accountability at all levels of education
3. Get the federal government out of education forever
4. Better textbooks that do not whitewash or revise our nation’s history in any way: textbooks need to tell the whole truth as well as instruct
5. Expand the school year
6. Eliminate the massive bureaucracy of education
7. More tests to determine strengths as well as failings for both students and teachers
8. Hold teachers as well as administration svvountable for failure; pay good teachers more and get rid of non performing teachers
9. Concentrate on the basics: reading, writing and arithmatic
Response: Recognize the vast intellectual gap decreed by nature and adjust to it.
Close them.
First, improve the attitudes and home environment of the students.
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.
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?
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.