OK. So here is the first proposition. From what I gather, the state pays some $10,000/year/student for education. Merit-based-pay sounds good on paper, but it's problematic in reality. What do you suppose would happen if we took the $60,000-$120,000/year that could be spent in a traditional school, and allowed parents to pay that to a certified "home schooler" (with the same or more rigorous standards teachers are held to now). Of course there would be oversight, but don't we have administrators already? Wouldn't that kind of income and freedom to really help kids grow attract great teachers (or maybe realistically keep the great ones from burning out and leaving)? How well does the feedback system of the amazon.com, zappos.com, the app store, etc. work compared to the current ways we evaluate teachers ? This might be great or it might be dumb. Please share your thoughts and push the snowball. At the risk of sounding dramatic, the stakes here are pretty high. Your input, from a completely different plan, to a simple post on Facebook to attract attention to the issue is the only way we can fix this. There is no knight to ride in and save us. Let's get busy!
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Saturday, May 14, 2011
How to fix our schools (?)
I really hope this is a bit of a snowball that grows with input from others. There is a serious problem in our country, and it won't be solved by one person with a plan or by us ignoring it. So for goodness sake, please consider this idea, and either promote it, rip it apart, or just tacitly pass it along. If we don't discuss it, our education system will continue to deteriorate and our country will decline and ultimately crash. We have nothing to lose by trying to fix this. Who knows, maybe we can find legitimate hope and make something better for once.
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Charter schools resembling this idea are popping up all the time. Mostly in the form of online schools that establish an accredited curriculum and only have face-to-face time one day a week. The face time usually ranges from 2 -6 hours per week, but unlimited contact through email or other web based portals. This system works very well with intelligent and highly driven students. Condoleezza Rice is my favorite example of this type of successful student. Unfortunately the kinds of students that are flocking to these schools are often the apathetic type that believes it will be easier than a traditional school. The students at these programs are failing state proficiency exams at an appalling rate, close to 33%, compared to 2-8% at traditional schools. While these programs have a place in the educational system, and deserve to be state funded, they should be only a small part of the solution. If too many of the wrong type of students go to these programs, I fear it will be a failed social experiment.
ReplyDeleteInteresting. Could it be viable to assign students who fail state proficiency exams to privately operated charter schools with 6-12 students that work together in person say 40 hours/week? Would the small size of cottage industry school help teachers and problematic students connect better, or would it cause school to be taken less seriously?
ReplyDeleteI could see that working. Kind of like a “little house on the prairie” school house. Already works well with pre-school kids. It would work with K-5 schools too. A charter school could provide the administration while the teachers would work like independent contractors. Assuming the state would pay on something like a voucher system (per student).
ReplyDeleteWith secondary schools, it wouldn’t work quite so well since teachers are required to be licensed in specific areas to teach those subjects. It would be extremely rare to find a teacher licensed in all of the core subjects.
I frankly didn't think of that. Ok. Clearly at the secondary level at least there is value in face time, and getting the teachers and students together. What if schools became a bit like shopping malls in that vendors, in this case independently operating teachers, leased the spaces and competed directly a bit, but capitalized on the shoppers of other stores, too? If a teacher was good enough to charge a premium or bad enough to go out of business, would that mechanism be better than what we have now? I know these proposals are naive. Also, how could we discuss this in a forum that would garner commentary from more people who are hopefully smarter than me?
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