Arkady
President
As a break from pure partisanship and horse-race politics, I'd like to hear people's ideas for improving education in this country. To get the ball rolling, here are some ideas with pros and cons:
(1) Better funding for schools. Pro: Just as a general concept, you get what you pay for. Con: we already pay more than most other wealthy nations per capita with poor results.
(2) Reforming teacher's unions. Pro: Union job security makes it hard to punish tenured bad performers. Con: If you decrease job security without improving the other draws, you'll make teaching less attractive and get worse teachers.
(3) High-stakes testing. Pro: most other high-performing nations use some form of high-stakes testing. Con: I takes away time from teaching time, while skewing lessons just to those things that can be tested well in a standardized way.
(4) Charter schools. Pro: puts the genius of the market to work, by putting schools in competition with each other for students. Con: actual attempts to measure the success of school choice haven't been very positive.
(5) Private school vouchers: Pro: Puts the genius of the market to work. Con: If done with small vouchers, it will tend to hurt the poor, who still won't be able to afford private school, and their public schools will worsen with the flight of upper- and middle-class students. Also, if the only local private schools are religious, may effectively force that "choice" on people who don't actually want religious indoctrination.
(6) "Common Core." Pro: creates a more consistent approach, with potential improved quality and lower cost. Con: deprives local states and districts of flexibility to respond to local needs.
(7) Various other innovations -- more technology in classes or less, montessori-style individual flexibility, smaller classes to increase student engagement or bigger classes to allow for economies of scale, more mainstreaming or less, two-track system for vocational education versus academic, financial rewards for academic performance, and so on.
What do people here think? If it helps, here's a fairly good indication of where education is succeeding and failing, based on NAEP scores, which may provide some guidance about where to look for successful strategies, and where to look for failed ones. This is an interesting chart because it shows both unadjusted results and demographically-adjusted ones, so if you suspect some states are just doing well because they're less burdened by problems that are actually driven by race (e.g., NH, Utah), you can look at the adjusted figures:
http://educationnext.org/how-do-states-really-stack-up-on-the-2015-naep/
Personally, I favor a Common Core concept, but not necessarily the specifics of what's currently in Common Core (which I don't know enough to comment on, in terms of approaches, matters to be covered, etc.) What I'm in favor of is a more consistent approach across the country, where there's a particular curriculum taught by grade level, and a high school diploma means you've mastered the same basic knowledge and skills regardless of whether you went to school in rural Alaska or downtown Miami.
I have a few reasons for that:
First, it's better for kids who move around a lot. I was an army brat, moving every two to three years, and that's tough in a situation with curricula that differ vastly from state to state. For example, for history you may find yourself one year in a class covering the Civil War, which you already covered the prior year in another school, so that you get almost nothing out of it. Then the next year, in another school system, you may get something on WWII that's presented as if you already know all about WWI, which the other kids covered the prior year, and you'll be completely lost. You'll end up bored half the time, with redundant material, and lost the other half. And when you graduate, you'll have big holes in material that fell between the cracks during your moves. A consistent approach eliminates that.
Second, it lets colleges and employers know that high school graduates have a certain basic quality that they can build on, with consistent curricula under their belts, and consistent grading systems. That doesn't mean the material has to be completely rigid. For example, teaching the literature of local writers or writers from the ethnic groups of most of your students may get more student engagement, and there should be some flexibility for that. But you don't want, for example, some high school graduates not knowing even the basics about Darwinian natural selection, or some other core building block of science, just based on the eccentricities of the local school district.
Third, it should cut down on a lot of needless expense and redundancy. For example, if every single school district picks its own fourth-grade science textbook, selecting hundreds of separate books among them, each trying to cut its own deal with publishers and buying in small batches, the per-unit costs will be huge. If you have one big purchase of fourth-grade science textbooks nation-wide, you'll be able to cut tremendous per-unit deals, and you'll also save on all the bureaucratic time wasted by thousands of local or state bureaucracies on that choice. You'll also have more supplemental third-party materials popping up on a national basis, like national tutoring and extra-curriculars that are based on a consistent curriculum they know is being taught nationally.
Fourth, curriculum design can be done by the very best educational experts in the country, rather than being fumbled through by local politicians often consisting of bored homemakers and retirees with part-time positions on school boards, without much education themselves, much less expertise in pedagogy.
Fifth, it makes sharing of resources simpler, even across state lines, which will mean savings. If every school is teaching the same basic material in the same grade, pulling in substitute teachers and filling openings is going to be a lot easier.
These solutions should help to lower costs while improving quality.
(1) Better funding for schools. Pro: Just as a general concept, you get what you pay for. Con: we already pay more than most other wealthy nations per capita with poor results.
(2) Reforming teacher's unions. Pro: Union job security makes it hard to punish tenured bad performers. Con: If you decrease job security without improving the other draws, you'll make teaching less attractive and get worse teachers.
(3) High-stakes testing. Pro: most other high-performing nations use some form of high-stakes testing. Con: I takes away time from teaching time, while skewing lessons just to those things that can be tested well in a standardized way.
(4) Charter schools. Pro: puts the genius of the market to work, by putting schools in competition with each other for students. Con: actual attempts to measure the success of school choice haven't been very positive.
(5) Private school vouchers: Pro: Puts the genius of the market to work. Con: If done with small vouchers, it will tend to hurt the poor, who still won't be able to afford private school, and their public schools will worsen with the flight of upper- and middle-class students. Also, if the only local private schools are religious, may effectively force that "choice" on people who don't actually want religious indoctrination.
(6) "Common Core." Pro: creates a more consistent approach, with potential improved quality and lower cost. Con: deprives local states and districts of flexibility to respond to local needs.
(7) Various other innovations -- more technology in classes or less, montessori-style individual flexibility, smaller classes to increase student engagement or bigger classes to allow for economies of scale, more mainstreaming or less, two-track system for vocational education versus academic, financial rewards for academic performance, and so on.
What do people here think? If it helps, here's a fairly good indication of where education is succeeding and failing, based on NAEP scores, which may provide some guidance about where to look for successful strategies, and where to look for failed ones. This is an interesting chart because it shows both unadjusted results and demographically-adjusted ones, so if you suspect some states are just doing well because they're less burdened by problems that are actually driven by race (e.g., NH, Utah), you can look at the adjusted figures:
http://educationnext.org/how-do-states-really-stack-up-on-the-2015-naep/
Personally, I favor a Common Core concept, but not necessarily the specifics of what's currently in Common Core (which I don't know enough to comment on, in terms of approaches, matters to be covered, etc.) What I'm in favor of is a more consistent approach across the country, where there's a particular curriculum taught by grade level, and a high school diploma means you've mastered the same basic knowledge and skills regardless of whether you went to school in rural Alaska or downtown Miami.
I have a few reasons for that:
First, it's better for kids who move around a lot. I was an army brat, moving every two to three years, and that's tough in a situation with curricula that differ vastly from state to state. For example, for history you may find yourself one year in a class covering the Civil War, which you already covered the prior year in another school, so that you get almost nothing out of it. Then the next year, in another school system, you may get something on WWII that's presented as if you already know all about WWI, which the other kids covered the prior year, and you'll be completely lost. You'll end up bored half the time, with redundant material, and lost the other half. And when you graduate, you'll have big holes in material that fell between the cracks during your moves. A consistent approach eliminates that.
Second, it lets colleges and employers know that high school graduates have a certain basic quality that they can build on, with consistent curricula under their belts, and consistent grading systems. That doesn't mean the material has to be completely rigid. For example, teaching the literature of local writers or writers from the ethnic groups of most of your students may get more student engagement, and there should be some flexibility for that. But you don't want, for example, some high school graduates not knowing even the basics about Darwinian natural selection, or some other core building block of science, just based on the eccentricities of the local school district.
Third, it should cut down on a lot of needless expense and redundancy. For example, if every single school district picks its own fourth-grade science textbook, selecting hundreds of separate books among them, each trying to cut its own deal with publishers and buying in small batches, the per-unit costs will be huge. If you have one big purchase of fourth-grade science textbooks nation-wide, you'll be able to cut tremendous per-unit deals, and you'll also save on all the bureaucratic time wasted by thousands of local or state bureaucracies on that choice. You'll also have more supplemental third-party materials popping up on a national basis, like national tutoring and extra-curriculars that are based on a consistent curriculum they know is being taught nationally.
Fourth, curriculum design can be done by the very best educational experts in the country, rather than being fumbled through by local politicians often consisting of bored homemakers and retirees with part-time positions on school boards, without much education themselves, much less expertise in pedagogy.
Fifth, it makes sharing of resources simpler, even across state lines, which will mean savings. If every school is teaching the same basic material in the same grade, pulling in substitute teachers and filling openings is going to be a lot easier.
These solutions should help to lower costs while improving quality.
The people who are good at what she does have the right personality. After observing her and hearing stories from her for 24 years, it seems apparent to me you MUST enjoy caring for people to be successful and happy in a health care job. Therefore, I make a similar conclusion about education. If you don't enjoy educating, you probably won't be a good teacher. If you are a good teacher, you should be rewarded accordingly. I've seen arguments against merit pay, essentially blaming getting stuck with stupid kids (perhaps I'll put it more eloquently later). I think that is something that could be controlled for with a merit pay system. A good system would attract and keep good teachers and the rest, for the most part, won't last. No system is 100%, of course. 
