How do you fix public schools in the US?

[tiffy33]

so sports is more important than education?
i cant believe what im reading.

OK I will make this easier to understand. Last season the Dallas Cowboys generated ~$500 million in total revenue. How much revenue are public schools bringing in? None so then how much funding or whatever does the average public school get per year? I can assure you its not half a billion. When you bring in more money you can afford to pay your employees more money. How is that so hard to understand? If every teacher was making $250,000 a year our country would be even more broke.

[Alvito]

arent they already? i mean what with their meager salaries and all.

Most babysitters get paid more per hour and only deal with 1 or 2 children instead of 20 to 30.

[Kathandira]

so sports is more important than education?
i cant believe what im reading.

Sports are a revenue generating industry, schools are not. This is why you cannot compare the two as they function completely differently.

[breadisfunny]

OK I will make this easier to understand. Last season the Dallas Cowboys generated ~$500 million in total revenue. How much revenue are public schools bringing in? None so then how much funding or whatever does the average public school get per year? I can assure you its not half a billion. When you bring in more money you can afford to pay your employees more money. How is that so hard to understand? If every teacher was making $250,000 a year our country would be even more broke.

i get it now. screw education we got sports. if you dont think lack of a decent salary is driving away teachers from public schools then i dont know what else to say.

[Raeph]

There are Vocational schools for kids who aren't interested in focusing on education.

I was a problem child. I was way more concerned with going outside and playing than studying. I didn't find school very engaging. When it came time to move onto highschool, my guidance councilor recommended I attend a Vocational Highschool.

At these schools, you take a course in a field of work rather than focusing on moving towards college. I had taken up Computer Assisted Drafting (CAD).

If this was more enforced, you could get away with separating the kids who aren't interested in education and those who are.

Sounds like what I experienced, in Houston, TX. HISD down there has a similar programs. I went to the high school that had the Computer Technology vocational courses, as well as a Advanced Placement track for normal courses. My sister went to the high school with Business vocational courses.

Years 1-3 your electives were per-determined based on the vocational track at your school, and year 4 you did half a day of high school courses (English 4, Math 4, etc) and the other half was paid vocational internships. Mine was 30 hours a week at a Financial Planning office of an Natural Gas company for that year.

[Alvito]

so its ok for sports starts to make 1million+ salaries while teachers dont even get 5% of that? yep everythings totally fine here.

It isn't like they are paid by the same people. Should teachers get more to attract better teacher, yes. Is it as easy as that, no. Just to give them all an extra dollar or two a year would be millions, to make an impact large enough they noticed it would go far beyond that.

[Bendog423]

The best thing we could do is limit class size to 12 kids per teacher.

[freighttrain]

I have never stepped foot into a public highschool but I have friends who are teachers and of course you are always reading about how crappy they are. I was fortunate enough to go off to boarding school starting in the 8th grade. The classes were smaller and I think my largest class had 20 students in it. Teachers actually cared about the students. Also because they lived on campus it was easy to go see them and they were always there to hear a problem even if it was 3am. There were many activities such as ski trips in the winter, club activities on the weekends, and mandatory spots in fall, winter, and spring to ensure we dont become lazy fat asses. The meals were sit down family style with actual chefs cooking each meal. Also even though the school had kids from not only different parts of the US but also from all over the world somehow everyone managed to get along and fights were very very rare. There were no cliques. The students respected each other and it wasnt uncommon to see Blacks, Whites, Asians, and Hispanics all hanging out together and having fun. Finally the best thing was of course there were no retarded bullshit problems public schools seem to have like people getting pregnant, doing drugs, or even shooting each other.

I understand that 99% of the population probably cant afford a $40,000 a year tuition for boarding school. So the only obvious solution is to make public schools better. So how can this be accomplished? Or is it even possible? The government keeps throwing money at public schools but it doesnt seem to be doing any good. So obviously the problem seems less money related and more about the students. So is the only solution to just remove the problem students who just dont give a shit? That way you only have kids there who want to learn so average scores will go up. Also with all the thug trash gone crime goes down. I mean why waste time and money trying to help kids who dont want to be helped? Isnt that money better off being spent on focusing on those students who do want to learn?

Finally are our public schools really that bad from an outside perspective? I mean do public schools in Europe or Japan or Korea or China have the same problems?

Put the money back into the schools that have been taken out over the past 30+ years in forms of tax breaks to the rich and businesses. Once you start there you can have more teachers so class sizes are manageable and students can get the attention they need. This will also allow for proper funding for and to the ability to once again have special needs schools instead of having those students thrown back in with the general student body like has happened.

The money is there. It is not a coincidence that the top marginal top tax rate and the actual amount of taxes paid by corporations has dropped by 50% since 1980 and the funding for and the quality of public schools has dropped sharply in the same time frame.

[Khaza-R]

Pump a fraction of the money that you pump into military and agencies like the NSA in education, healthcare and such?

Funny. The US already spends more per pupil on education than any other country in the world. Yet its K-12 education quality isn't even in the top 10.

Surprisingly, throwing money at problems isn't always the solution. Go figure.

[tiffy33]

I see a lot of talk about money and especially teacher salary. How is Miss Teacher getting paid $100,000 a year going to help Johnny Psycho who doesnt want to learn and only cares about doing drugs and being a bully making life miserable for students who do want to learn?

[Kathandira]

clearly the patriots add more to your childrens lives than learning about ww2 or any of that math junk ever could. PSH who needs to learn 2+2 when you have sports?

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50k is not a sweet deal when you live in a prohibitively expensive cost of living area like say new york. try again.

I don't know how much a teacher in NY gets paid. However I do know this much, NY is a very expensive place to live, one of the most expensive in the country. You can't really base a national issue on 1 city's expenses and wages.

It was mentioned that in New Jersey, starting wages is $48k a year. At 21 years old, that is a damn fine salary. And you get yearly raises so in about 5 years, you can be making quite a bit more. As time goes on, your salary only gets better and better.

It's anecdotal, but I don't know a single teacher who complains about their wages.

[NuLogic]

Poor schools will always do poorly. Maybe spend a bit more on education and less on defense....oh wait no one cares.

[Khaza-R]

Is that just the government or does it include what people also spend on private schools out of their own pocket?

Government spending on education.

[Kathandira]

Funny. The US already spends more per pupil on education than any other country in the world. Yet its K-12 education quality isn't even in the top 10.

Surprisingly, throwing money at problems isn't always the solution. Go figure.

This has been echo'd for a long time. One of the reasons it doesn't work, is because the money doesn't always making it to the child. It gets shoved in the Teacher's Union's coffers.

[Sarcon]

Give them back all the government funding that they've been robbed of over the last couple decades for the sake of national defense?

[Tastyfish]

Pretty good salary for a young man or woman who only needed a community college education to perform the job. I know quite a few people who would kill for $35 a year.

Yea, but you know there comes a lot of unattractive things with starting that job.
Parents on a mission to deny their child having issues, being the best one.
It's not really an attractive job to people who don't have it as a calling really.

[Khaza-R]

This has been echo'd for a long time. One of the reasons it doesn't work, is because the money doesn't always making it to the child. It gets shoved in the Teacher's Union's coffers.

I'm aware. A large portion of the spending gets caught up in administration and other non-essential elements. For that reason, charter schools in the US often out-perform traditional public schools by a wide margin.

But the poster I was quoting, proported the solution is "more spending". Which isn't true, its smarter spending.

[Kathandira]

Poor schools will always do poorly. Maybe spend a bit more on education and less on defense....oh wait no one cares.

In New Jersey, we had appointed these poor schools who under perform, Abbott Districts. We shoved so much money at them, it would make Solomon blush. It did absolutely nothing. These schools did not perform better.

As others have said, money is not going to make Johnny or Susie pay attention in class.

[Tastyfish]

This has been echo'd for a long time. One of the reasons it doesn't work, is because the money doesn't always making it to the child. It gets shoved in the Teacher's Union's coffers.

I wonder why this is not the case with the more cherry deals with the police union.

[Yvaelle]

The US System specifically:

Stop letting the "Texas Board of Evangelical Elementary School Dropouts" - decide what is and isn't allowed in the textbooks / class cirriculum, and then pushing that to all the other states.

Erase all student loan debt. Education is the most effective investment in the future of your country - discouraging education via exorbitant loans, and poor quality education due to for-profit universities - undermines the future of your own country. If you need to charge loans - have a government monopoly on student loan offers - and charge interest equal to the rate of inflation per year unpaid (zero adjusted interest). If you were really smart about it, you would be paying kids to get as much quality education as they can withstand (that's what a lot of the top countries are doing).


More generally, all education systems could be improved via the following:

Ditch the remmants of "No Child Left Behind" and recognize that kids learn at different speeds and in different styles. Stop forcing a prescribed cirriculum on each teacher for each lesson - and let them recognize the outcomes the kids need, and teach in the manner they think best.

Create a resource for teachers to share lesson styles and materials they develop with other teachers across the country - an online forum-type thing - so that teachers can consolidate their efforts, learn from one another, and apply the most effective solutions - or try other ones - depending on what they think will work best for their students. Create it so that only teachers can access it (verification step), and can upvote systems they like - so that new teachers can sort by the highest rated. Then add a forum-section to each posted lesson plan so that teachers can offer their advice to update or improve it (again with upvote systems).

Redesign the grade system to place greatest emphasis soonest on languages and mathematics - followed by classes in critical thinking, logic, debate, etc - only after all that should you start teaching them sciences and history and Information courses.
1. Teach them how to communicate.
2. Teach them how to learn, and how to think.
3. Teach them information.

That's how all education should work - and really - a system like that should be opened up to the world. Governments should put shared resources into creating online lesson plans - similar to Khan Academy - but with a professional budget / graphic design (ie. Visual.ly).

Further, lecture-style learning could also occur outside class, via online videos, and should be assigned as homework (it could also be trackable by which students watched the video) - while class time should be devoted to having the teacher help the kids work through problems (like homework) - this is Flipped Learning - and I'm a big believer in it.

Lastly, we need more effort into fun educational content for kids - like Reading Rainbow, Bill Nye, and Sesame Street: programs such as these should be recognized for what they are - fantastic engagement tools for K-12 learning. You cannot buy what these programs are giving away.