Improving our schools

If I got one wish to improve society, it would be to fix our education system - K-12 & HigherEd.

First off, this is not a funding issue. There is no coorelation between money spent and quality of education. And most other industrialized countries spend about half what we do on education. So even with TABOR, the recession, etc - we can fix this today.

Here are what I think are the major problems we face for K-12.

• Lack of parental involvement. Ask any kid who made it through college from a poor background and they will tell you there was someone encouraging & pushing them the whole way. Look at most (not all) of the failures in a rich area like Boulder and their parents are checked out.
• Crappy teachers. School teachers, like any large group, fit along the Bell curve. The problem is a single bad teacher has widespread impact because they harm every kid who passes through their class. If 5% of the teachers are horrible, then every child gets 2 by the end of K-12. Two subjects they did not learn for a year, two classrooms that made them hate school day in and day out.
• No accountability. Up here in Boulder they finally "blew up" Columbine Elementary so we see some accountability. But every teacher there with tenure, if Columbine does not take them back, gets a gauranteed spot in another school. And it's not just teachers, we need to hold principals, administrators, staff, & school boards accountable. Those doing a bad job must be put on probation, and if they don't improve, be fired.
  (Now high school football coaches are held accountable - do a bad job and you will be replaced. Apparently success in football is more important than success in academics.)
• Piss-poor system. We are still teaching children the same way we did 200 years ago. Can you name anything else that has not evolved in the last 200 years? Standing in front of a room giving a lecture is probably the lest effective way to teach. The wonder is that some kids do learn under this system.
• Neighborhood schools. This was a great idea when the blue collar kids all went from high school to the factory and the rich kids all went on to college - they each had schools that trained them for their pre-defined future. But now when we want virtually all kids to have an equal chance and the jobs they go to are so diverse, having the same focus for all the kids in a neighborhood makes no sense. Especially in middle and high school the system should be designed that the schools are different and the child goes to the one that is somewhat convinient and is a goo fit.

I think we need to face up to the fact that our present arangement of local school boards running school districts is an abysmal failure. Tweaking it on the edges won't fix it.

I also don't think a monolithic state controlled system is the answer either.

I think we need to find some system where responsibility and control of the school is pushed down to the school level. But we have oversight and requirements that come from the district level, and the districts are measured by the state.

I think we need to include a couple of things with this.

1. Pay is tied to performance. 1/3 of teacher/staff salaries and 2/3 of principal/administrator salary is tied to student graduation rates of their students 2 grades beyond the top grade that person was responsible for. So the district administrators get 2/3 of their salaries on the number of students who complete 2 years of college.
2. Improve the way we teach. It's the school's job to draw the kids in - so they find they want to learn.
3. Eliminate tenure. Require that 1% of the teachers are fired each year for the next 5 years to break the mindset of no one is ever fired.
4. Include the parents. I'm not talking a parents night or two, but that there is an ongoing concerted effort to get the parents involved day by day in helping their children succeed.