Bipartisan Proposal on Education Reform
“>An independent commission yesterday proposed dramatic changes that would shake up American public education in an effort to make the nation more competitive globally. The recommendations include authorizing school districts to pay companies to run all their schools; enrolling many students in college after the 10th grade; and paying teachers about $100,000 annually.The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce — a bipartisan panel that includes former Cabinet secretaries and governors in addition to federal and state education officials and business and civic leaders — issued the recommendations in a report on the future workforce. The commissioners warned that unless improvements are made in the nation’s public schools and colleges by 2021, a large number of jobs would be lost to countries including India and China, where workers are better educated and paid much less than their U.S. counterparts.
“The United States has one of the highest costs of education but produces mediocre results,” added Knapp, former president of the University of Georgia. “The recommendations are absolutely necessary if we want America to maintain its standard of living.”
I hope some State adopts these reforms just so we can see if they work. I felt likewise in support of the Washington DC voucher program. What the US does best, and what the federal system nurtures, is experimenting and adapting to find better and more efficient ways to git’r done.
My hope and intention for bi-partisan cooperation is to liberate competition to improve our quality of life.
18 Responses to “Bipartisan Proposal on Education Reform”
As the father of an 11-year-old autistic boy, I have some qualms about private companies running the schools. It’s bad enough that Bush’s No Child Left Behind fiasco is squeezing schools with large disabled populations, what do you suppose a private company will do? Most private schools won’t accept special needs kids as it is, because they require extra funding for tutors, aides, adaptive equipment, etc.
That is something worth including in the plan, a higher “pay” for accepting a disabled child.
But how great would it be if you had schools competing with themselves to convince you to send your boy there?
Good point.
I didn’t get the impression from the article that it was an all or nothing scheme. It seems reasonable that students with special needs could and should be accommadated.
That said I wonder if a system more oriented towards cost/benefit might also be motivated to finding the most effective methods for working with special needs. Market systems are not just about finding the cheapest methods but also the most efficient.
Get the blueprint of the top view of a super luxury motor home.
This is a hyper futuristic traveling school, it is like Star Wars or Star Trek and we can build them today, if we have the guts to draw the blueprints ourselves and never depend on any other engineers to draw the blueprints.
Simply erase everything except the drivers seat and dashboard of the bus, then design a traveling classroom with, GET THIS….real private shower rooms, at least two of them.
Then the seats are actually like little cubicles and offices for each student.
Think of a custom designed seat, especially custom built for each student, so it is their size and it can stop a back injury if it if built to their size.
Several of these things can be parked together and hooked together and some of them would be workshops and some would be for water tanks and utilities and medical and science facilities.
The objective is to pick the student up at home and then take the student to the highest quality instructor in the field being studied.
If you study space , go to NASA, if you study food, go to a chef, if you study cars go to a car factory, and set up the school in their parking lot.
Treat the students like adults and they will behave like adults.Treat them better than adults, let the students take over, as soon as possible after graduation, stop making them wait till they are fifty or sixty to lead.
This idea sounds dreamy and stupid, but it is actually less expensive, part for part, than the present system that almost does not work at all and costs billions to prop up.
A convoy of these super luxury schools would easily pay for itself when we let the kids have plush carpet, brass, glass, and private showers and bathrooms.
Treat them “classy” and possibly they will build a classy country.
Or profiteering at the expense of the taxpayer, and in this case, children.
Oh, that’s a genus idea, since we all know places like inner cities of New Jersey which shove money down teacher throats are sending forth the best and brightest.
Andrew,
What alternative do you endorse to get the best bang for our educational buck?
gattsuru,
Why do you think that NJ is getting such a poor return for its investment?
Are there circumstances when some highly skilled and experienced teachers deserve a salary as high as $100k?
That’s the operative, essential point in Paul’s post, I think. What we have now is not working all that well — and one size will never fit all — so let’s mix it up a little.
Innovation = Survival
Am I the only one that thinks that our failing educational system is a symptom of cultural influences more than anything else? Most kids these days just don’t care about learning.
That’s quite an exaggeration: Most kids these days just don’t care about learning.
It might be true from the point of view that the educational system is not adapting to the way many kids learn nowadays.
Any experts out there care to comment?
Mikkel,
No, I agree with you, though I also see some failures of the educational system itself. I’ve already mentioned that I think there is too much early pressure toward specific benchmarks of performance (which are achievable by some but not others due to the huge variance in developmental readiness). And I agree strongly with something brought up in another thread about learning styles: some kids have right brain dominance, some have left; some are visual learners while others are auditory, kinetic or a combination. There’s been a lot of research to better understand learning styles, but only a very limited amount of application of that knowledge to tailor education to the individual child.
But back to your point: motivation of the students is a huge problem, and perhaps the greatest one. I guess I wonder if the two issues might be somewhat interrelated because kids tune out of education if they aren’t stimulated toward it in a way that they can be successful. The prevaling culture influences too, of course, but I think that most little kids could be better hooked into learning if it were done properly during the early grades, and kept hooked into it if they were more inspired during the middle and higher grades.
I agree that there is much about the American educational system that should change. I further agree that states should have the ability to experiment and see what works before we go imposing largely untested rules on a federal level.
However, I do not think school management companies are a way forward. Public schools are too important to be a for-profit venture. Such a system would add unnecessary expenses and reduce the autonomy of the front-line teachers and principals that actually know what is going on in their facility. Look carefully at Wall Street and tell me if you really want Maurice Greenberg or Ken Lay or Sandy Weill in charge of your school district’s management company. Most school boards are elected and answer to voters; corporations answer to stockholders.
I think vouchers are an even worse idea. And frankly I thought so before I even began to consider the dilemma of kids who need special services of any sort. Every voucher plan I have seen to date underestimates the costs of sending a child to a quality, accredited, secular private school. Furthermore, I fear that voucher programs are a back-door attempt to control the curriculum and programs of private schools. The government is very good at saying “you can have this money, but only if you do things our way.”
CS I believe you’re exactly right that it’s the early grades that matter most. I personally believe the split occurs between the 4th and 8th grades. This is when they actually start learning more formal information and where learning style has a huge impact on whether they actually understand the information or not.
That said, I went to school in a lot of different educational environments. In general I found almost all middle-upper class kids had all the tools they needed to learn or not. Many of them didn’t care about learning because they know the saying “90% of what you do in your job is learned there” and felt secure that they’d get a good job if they just puttered along.
Almost all of the lower/lower-middle class kids felt like no matter what they did they wouldn’t be able to succeed because the deck was stacked against them and they didn’t have much help, so why bother.
In my personal observation the great teachers were only able to affect very small segments of the students. These included the smart college (in most cases even the “post college”) bound kids that already thirsted for knowledge and wanted more, and the lower class kids that felt like it wasn’t useful because they wouldn’t ever get the opportunity but it was actually interesting.
I’d say the two groups made up roughly 15-20%. Occasionally a Hollywood feel good story could emerge if there was a really great teacher, but most of the time not. I used to talk a lot with a couple kids from the latter group that were gang members and they wished they could go to college but figured it was too late. They both were really interested in learning for learning’s sake though and so I’d teach them a lot and mentioned they could definitely go to college if they tried hard enough. They both were adament that this was impossible because they were trapped in their lives and one got shot and missed six months of school and ended up dropping out.
It was too bad because he had about average intelligence but actually grasped things a lot better than most of the middle class gifted kids I went to high school with. That was because he didn’t take the teaching for granted.
I’m all for experimentation, and think that in the long run you need to try new things and see if they work, but I don’t think corporations are the way to go. Businesses, especially young ones, have a very short sighted mind set. Their goals are orriented towards the next fiscal quarter, not what a child will be like in 15 years.
Talking online with a guy who can analyze Nietzche without even going to college but is waiting to see if he’s going to go to jail for violating his probabtion and another flat out musical prodigy who is floundering because he tried to just do the normal route through college instead of a specialized program has made me realize what I think the core problem is.
There is increasing belief that merit and hard work has little to do with success in life.
It seems like we’re turning into a personality/game show economy. Most of the high power jobs like lawyers, bankers, politicans, entertainers etc. exude the message that it’s the style and message that matters most.
The music guy thinks that in order to make it you have to be lucky enough to happen to run into a music producer. The gang member thought no matter what he did it wouldn’t help. The gifted kids knew they’d coast through no matter what. I’m aware it’s all anecdotal but it is generally applicable to a vast number of people I’ve known. That’s why they think school is unimportant except as a resume line.
You always have to compare things to their alternative, not to how you want them to be.
If schools are turned over to corporations, will some of them be corrupt and do bad jobs? Yes.
However, the past three superintendents in my school district were fired – one for incompetence and two for stealing from the system. Have a look at Georgia, where the state directors of schools was recently sent to federal prison for stealing from the kids.
My point is that Government isn’t doing that hot either. The question must be whether things will be better or worse if we make a change.
ShortWoman:
Well, no. But look at Wall Street and tell me if you want Bill Gates or Warren Buffet to be running your kid’s school. To stick within the education field, what about Stanley Kaplan?
But the point is that companies also answer to customers, which would be parents in properly set up system.
My wife’s school district is at risk of being dis-accredited by the Colorado Dept. of Ed. The reason? In an attempt to provide the best “customer service” to the parents and to make themselves look good, they’ve dumbed down the curriculum so far that the state is considering making the entire district’s diplomas much worse.
And all because the district believes that “customer service” is the right way to go. And if they’d identified the right customer, they may have been right. But the customer is NOT the parents – it’s the children. And doing what’s right for the education of the children sometimes means doing what’s wrong for the parents or the government or the union or the school administration or the company running the charter school.
I’m not saying that I have all the answers, nor am I saying that the ideas from the bipartisan panel all suck (although a few do), but rather that company focus on customers will only work if the company realizes that their customers are not the parents, but the kids. And doing right by the kids will sometimes mean doing wrong by stockholders and parents, and what company will ever do that willingly?
Mikkel makes a very good point about a perceived disconnect between merit, preparation (As in school.), work and success. If there’s one thing that anyone who pays attention to conditions in this country realizes it’s that hard work and loyalty means nothing to large numbers of modern business executives. Firing enough people to make Wall Street happy means a lot to them. How this affects the people who are left and their quality of life doesn’t mean anything to those executives either. How many kids see their parents fired? How many hear conversations between their folks about what it’s like since the downsizing or merger? How many hear about it from their friends explaining changes in their life? The actions of these unthinking excuses for business leaders have a ripple effect throughout our society. How often is it the incompetence of management that produces results that penalize the employees? In poor neighborhoods kids see everything from people who do anything to avoid a regular job to people who work themselves to the bone and get nowhere for their effort. Isn’t it possible that all of that enters into the worldview of the upcoming generation?