(Okay, sorry, another long post. Skip it if you like, but some ideas you’ve maybe not heard before if you suffer through the whole thing.)
Just my opinion.
Schools were better not too many years ago than they are now. They weren't good, but they were better. NCLB is a disaster. The testing doesn't work. Teaching to the test isn't teaching. Educators should solve the problems in education. And, yes, the solutions involve spending money.
I don't believe NCLB was ever intended to work. I think it was a step in a long term plan to privatize education. Along with “school vouchers” and “charter schools”, there is a movement to drastically cut the education offered to American children. I also think the "the more we spend the worse it gets" language is designed to that end. Of course, that's an absurd thing to say. It's crafted to imply a causal and inverse relationship between spending and effectiveness, which, of course, defies logic. Taken to its ultimate conclusion, we can only assume the very best education system will be the result of zero spending.
But look at the private schools that perform better. Do they spend less per student than the public schools? (Depends on what you measure- services provided etc., but regular student in regular classroom they spend more on the student. Bear in mind the parents bear more responsability for many costs at private schools, teachers make less, for a number of reasons, one of which I'll touch on in a minute, and they can refuse service to problematic students... which leads me to.) What they have going for them is the same thing the schools in China have – the kids that are a problem aren’t there. And the teachers who are there want to be there. The work environment for them is so much better than it is for teachers in many public schools.
In my opinion, the solution is not to abandon the problem children. Allll kinds of things going on there that schools shouldn’t have to address. I completely agree with that. But fewer resources make it worse, not better. My solution? Kids cause problems or don’t show up for school, they’re removed from the “regular” school and are put in the “problem child” school. This is not a dead end school. This is a school with a much lower student to teacher ratio. Teachers with a lot more training. These schools would have a much longer school day that would include a fair bit of counseling. More time at school means less time getting into trouble somewhere else. For the real, real had cases, which would be a very few kids, there’s a boarding school.
It would cost a lot. We’d have to (gasp!) raise taxes. But think of the pay-off. Think how much better our neighborhoods would be. Think how many kids who would have ended up in jail will now end up with jobs. In the long run it would pay for itself many times over. Fewer people in jail. A largely effective solution to the “gang problem”. Much less crime. Many more people working and paying taxes.
A lot of these kids made one mistake- they picked the wrong parents. And I think it’s completely within our rights as a society to say “you failed as a parent and you have lost that privilege.” Really, the parents of the few kids who would end up in the “boarding school” option are likely not going to get too bent out of shape about them being taken away. If they really cared that much, we wouldn’t have gangs of unsupervised kids running around the streets of our cities selling drugs and shooting each other.
This would work in conjunction with my plan to put a lot more police on the streets (How many? As many as it takes) and almost completely defund the gangs by legalizing drugs. But those are for a different thread. I’ll stop before I pie myself.
