Reform of the US education system

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Postby scythe » 2012.04.19 (16:03)

This has been occupying my mind for a while -- I've got a few ideas but right now I don't have the time to type them out, so I'll come back with them in a few hours.

But, the general question: the education system in the US has problems. NCLB didn't work. What next?
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Postby aids » 2012.04.19 (16:59)

I too have many suggestions, some more practical than the others, which are mostly based on my experiences. I'll try to collect them from my brain and come back to share.
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Postby 乳头的早餐谷物 » 2012.04.20 (05:09)

As a non-American: what are the problems?
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Postby otters~1 » 2012.04.20 (23:08)

oughts wrote:As a non-American: what are the problems?
The main ones off the top of my head are:

-catering to the lowest common denominator
-massive and uncalled for cost of higher education
-teachers have no control over what they teach, and how
-standardized testing system is either pointless, broken or both
-mass cheating (if you haven't read Freakonomics, you should)
-lack of specialization opportunities

Roughly prioritized.
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Postby ENT474 » 2012.04.22 (15:07)

oughts wrote:As a non-American: what are the problems?
They're generally just bad. The combination of what centerfire said leads to either low grades, little mastery, or both. This is obviously a big problem.
Also, I would argue that NCLB helped slightly; only it didn't focus on the right points and therefore caused different results than its intention.
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Postby otters~1 » 2012.04.23 (03:12)

No Child Left Behind led directly to lying and cheating spreading pervasively through the system. Given the generally low resources of state school districts, if a child is in danger of being "left behind," the most likely course of action is something being done to his scores quietly. In the meantime, children who are operating at the mean or slightly above it but with potential for much more are allowed to stagnate because all the meager funding is going to frantically making sure every student hits some sort of arbitrary benchmark, however impossible this clearly is. The answer is probably the early-specialization, socialist solution that you can see in action in places like Sweden, Germany etc. The insurmountable problem is forcing a new system on a resisting American public.
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Postby scythe » 2012.04.23 (17:41)

centerƒire wrote:No Child Left Behind led directly to lying and cheating spreading pervasively through the system. Given the generally low resources of state school districts, if a child is in danger of being "left behind," the most likely course of action is something being done to his scores quietly. In the meantime, children who are operating at the mean or slightly above it but with potential for much more are allowed to stagnate because all the meager funding is going to frantically making sure every student hits some sort of arbitrary benchmark, however impossible this clearly is. The answer is probably the early-specialization, socialist solution that you can see in action in places like Sweden, Germany etc. The insurmountable problem is forcing a new system on a resisting American public.
flag is right.

In the old days, we just had grades. Standardized testing happened at the end of high school, and that was it. But the system was unequal and people thought it was unfair. Schools in rich neighborhoods had better teachers and better education than schools in poor neighborhoods. And if the local school was bad, there wasn't much you could do about it, and it wasn't easy to call your Congresscritter and prove that it was bad.

So the rallying cry became accountability!

Tests everywhere. Every student in every school takes the same test on the same day so we can see how they're all doing. But now the curriculum "teaches to the test". A subject is taught not in the natural way but in the way appropriate to pass the test: my high school English teachers complained that they had to teach us to write the wrong way because it was what they expected on the FCAT (Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test). I can't disagree with that assessment because my writing was always terrible in high school. As for math, my aunt gave me a book on complex analysis for my thirteenth birthday and I spent the next two years staying up at night trying to digest it. I have a skewed perspective on math.

Now we cheat on the tests. It didn't work. Teachers are unhappy; instead of writing their own curriculum, they teach the standard curriculum. Assessment has grown from annually to many times a year.

The most successful programs have involved something that looks like school choice. I went to a magnet school. Some magnet school programs, whether their focus is on technical disciplines or art, have worked pretty well. Conservatives have used this to argue for "voucher" programs where the government pays for kids to attend private schools, which obviously implies choices. Why conservatives want the government to spend more money is anyone's guess.

Other countries have public education systems that work. There's no reason that it can't work. We have public services in America that work: the post office, the NHTSA, the IRS, the SEC.

My first proposal is to charge rich people money for public schools. School choice helps by driving competition. I'd like to drive competition without wasting my money, so I say we spend the money of people who have money. If, above a certain income threshold, we start to charge money for public school -- maybe a family making 30k pays nothing, a family making 50k pays 1k per child, a family making 70k pays 3k per child, and a family making >100k pays 5k per child, it levels the field for private schools to compete: it's hard to compete with free.

Competition has historically and in general been the best source of accountability for any industry. The students -- or the students' parents -- have more information on which to make choices than test scores. If the public school sucks, those who can will move their kids to a private school. If school funding is based on enrollment and enrollment alone, and the government covers the cost for poor kids, the public school is "motivated to improve" like any other capitalist thing.

Yes, poor kids who go to bad schools still get screwed. They get screwed to begin with. It's harder for them to move; they don't have the legal or informational resources to figure out how to send a kid to a public school in another district. Rich people have these options today. But if the administration has to try to draw students to the school, we force them to focus on improving the educational experience, not to focus on improving test scores.

The best thing we can do for the poor is to abolish the districts, so they can send their kids to whatever school they want, including one in a good neighborhood. If a bad public school really starts shedding students like blood from an amputated limb, we close it and move the kids to a different one somewhere else.

My second proposal is that the testing system should be separate from the education system. Testing can be helpful: it provides the consumers -- students and parents -- a way to judge the quality of the education they receive from a school. Good test scores can be used, for example, as a criterion for admission to a specialized program. Testing should be available to people who want it or need it. If we give people the information they need to make good decisions, they are more likely to make good decisions. Government-run testing and private testing can both accomplish this; government-run testing can fill in gaps in an ecosystem where private testing does not exist.

My third proposal involves birthrates. Specifically, we want a stable one, about 2. If we make it more expensive to have kids, people have less of them; see above proposal about paying for school. In order to compensate for the negative effects on birthrate of charging the rich for school for their kids, we give them the tax break per-child to pay for it. Europe and East Asia have a birthrate that is too low. Central Asia and Africa have one that is too high. Luckily ours is presently about 2.1, which is basically stable.

My last proposal is encouraging local freedom to experiment. Things like merit pay and tenure reform aren't necessarily all-or-nothing: if we let some schools try them, we can see how it works.

I tend to think it is a better idea to plant a seed than to build a tree. If we give people the tools to improve their own education, people learn about how to improve education.
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Postby aids » 2012.04.23 (19:12)

If you can spare some time, watch Waiting for Superman. It talks about the things that scythe mentioned.
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Postby Pikman » 2012.12.27 (05:57)

scythe wrote:Other countries have public education systems that work. There's no reason that it can't work. We have public services in America that work: the post office, the NHTSA, the IRS, the SEC.
All of your examples there are nationally managed, and the post office isn't exactly working if it has to drastically reduce its operating flexibility year to year. Schools, on the other hand, are more locally overseen, with performance assessed to varying degrees at the state level. Should the US nationalize or better standardize education to achieve its aims?
scythe wrote:My first proposal is to charge rich people money for public schools. School choice helps by driving competition. I'd like to drive competition without wasting my money, so I say we spend the money of people who have money. If, above a certain income threshold, we start to charge money for public school -- maybe a family making 30k pays nothing, a family making 50k pays 1k per child, a family making 70k pays 3k per child, and a family making >100k pays 5k per child, it levels the field for private schools to compete: it's hard to compete with free.
I think first you'd have to remove the compulsory requirement to attend school. But either way, sooner or later the question might come up - why do we even have public education, if there are extra costs on top of what we pay in taxes? I'm sure most, if not all, states could justify K-12 schooling as a compelling state interest if taken to court, but to what extent? Is your view of school competition one in which public schools are vulnerable?

I'm also sorry for the eight-month bump.

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Postby McP3000 v2.0 » 2013.01.10 (05:54)

Public education is a bad idea. Always has been, always will be.

Sorry if you hate me for saying it but the concept is inherently flawed.
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Postby Pikman » 2013.01.12 (23:48)

McP3000 v2.0 wrote:Public education is a bad idea. Always has been, always will be.
Though, it wouldn't be "reforming" a system if you abhor its very existence from the outset. But any true end to public education will take years to phase in. In many respects, the US government has dug itself some large holes and will never bother refilling them.

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Postby scythe » 2013.01.13 (02:58)

McP3000 v2.0 wrote:Public education is a bad idea. Always has been, always will be.

Sorry if you hate me for saying it but the concept is inherently flawed.
I'm interested to know whether you think the problem is quality or bias, since I've heard the argument made from both angles.
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Postby otters~1 » 2013.01.13 (05:24)

▲▪►▪▼◄▲ wrote:If you can spare some time, watch Waiting for Superman. It talks about the things that scythe mentioned.
fuck that watch waiting for guffman instead
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Postby Tunco » 2013.01.23 (14:21)

scythe wrote:
McP3000 v2.0 wrote:Public education is a bad idea. Always has been, always will be.

Sorry if you hate me for saying it but the concept is inherently flawed.
I'm interested to know whether you think the problem is quality or bias, since I've heard the argument made from both angles.
I'm interested in the argument itself and the perspectives it can propel from, can you elaborate?
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