I’m normally in favor of much smaller government but what would be wrong with giving control of K through 12 public education to a Federal agency? Obviously, this would require changing the Constitution. Consider:
The Federal government already provides money to the states for education.
No Child Left Behind (as crappy as it is) is a sort of back door set of national education standards
A minimum standard of education for all citizens is at least as vital to national security/prosperity as other subjects of Federal meddling, such as drug policy, seat belt laws, farm subsidies, highways, etc.
One inefficient, mismanaged bureaucracy couldn’t be any harder to oversee than thousands, could it?
Is our current decentralized system really better? Why? What am I missing?
The problem is that the needs of Colorado Springs, Dallas, Sacramento, and Tunica, Mississippi might be radically different.
It does allow districts to decide what their own problems are and then tackle them. I’m not so sure this would be so easy to acomplish if there was one centralized department in Washington D.C. If I’m currently living in an excellent school district what motivation do I have for the Feds to take over? If I’m living in a bad district what makes me think the Feds will do a better job?
Yes, but the differences between Upper East Side New York and The Bronx are different as well.
I’d like to see some sort of national curriculuum guidlines so that people moving from one state to another have some hope that their kids will not have a huge disruption. I’d also like to see us move away from the grade (as in K-12) based system to a mastery system where you master a subject and then move on to the next. At age 16 some kids are ready for college while others are still working on becoming proficient readers. Putting them all together in one grade is a bit silly.
I think we copuld start by having a master teacher certificate administered by the Feds. To get one you would have to show mastery of a subject area combined with a talent for teaching. Pay those people $100K a year and you’d pull a lot of smart people into teaching. Even just having one master teacher per-school would be a big help.
Disclaimer: I have little familiarity with the US school system (to which I assume you are referring.) I think your ideas, however, as well as my response, are probably applicable to almost any “Western” system of education.
True enough. I agree that each school district has different needs. This probably means, however, that school districts would be better off with more and not less self-sufficiency.
Now, this I totally agree with. I think you need some kind of Federal (or whatever Central Agency exists) Supervisory Board making very, very broad policy and baseline requirements, and (as I said) more control at the local level on their implementation.
Ain’t happening, and probably (IMO) shouldn’t. School is (again, IMHO) also, if not mostly, about socializing. While there may certainly be exceptions, I think most 9 YO kids should be studying in a group with other kids roughly the same age (say, at most, in th 8-10 YO range.) Imagine a gifted 9 YO when it’s time to recess and (s)he tries to play football (soccer to you :p. Or, really, any other game where physical size and strength matter) with their 12 YO “peers.” Never mind what happens when you start mixing pre- and post-pubescent young people in the same peer group – it’s bad enough with the natural spread in sexual maturity among young people of the same age group, already!
If only… Pull this off, and all the other problems in the education system would pretty much solve themselves!
Mixing kids of different ages is not what I had in mind. It’s just breaking the curriculuum into chunks and having each kid individually do the work. This is how Montessori schools work and they are very effective. I have seen too many smart kids leave high school with no idea how to do homework because they have skated along without having to any real work in classes that are too easy.
Yes, that’s true, so let New York decide how they want to handle education in their state.
How does it work now? I will say that I was keenly aware of the education rift between my school in Texas and those of Waveland, Mississipi back in 1987. The books they were reading in 8th grade had been read by my sister and myself back in elementary school.
That sounds very impractical. Somone who isn’t a proficient reader by the age of 16 is all kinds of fucked up though whether it’s the school, the child, or the family I could not say. Second, just because students are in the same grade doesn’t mean they’re all learning the exact same thing. The kids in AP English don’t necessarily cover the same things as the kids in regular English courses and certainly not the same as is covered in developmental courses even though they’re all in the same grade.
I’m not really sure the Feds can do that.
How would having one “master teacher” per school help? I wonder if the Teachers Union would go for that.
That was tried in Israel for quite a long time. Starting in 7[sup]th[/sup] grade, Math, English and maybe another subject were not studied in home-rooms, but rather all the 7[sup]th[/sup] graders were broken down into groups according to their level of proficiency/achievement (which would probably correlate to general intelligence in most cases – but certainly not all. ADHD, other learning disabilities, stigmata…)
This worked exceptionally well for the “better” students (read: those who were put in the top group and could manage there.) They moved ahead rapidly, actually had to think and work to keep up, etc…
For the average and under-average achieving students… not so well.
The system was abolished roughly when I was finishing high-school (which was long enough ago that I ain’t tellin’!! :eek: )
That’s one of the problems with starting a new educational plan. It takes years to see if it works and by the time you know one way or the other it’s too late for the students who have already gone through the system.
I am going to come back to this tomorrow when I have time. However, for the interim, I will simply point out that the federal government should only involve itself when absolutely necessary. In the absence of some indication that the current system of socialized education is broken, and cannot be fixed without federalization, the system should not be federalized.
As a country, we’d be a whole lot better off if the federal government would stop acting as the corrector of all evils in our country. We’d also be better off if California and Ohio had differences besides the weather and the topography.
Boy, what a bunch of nay-sayers. Try and change education and both the right and left jump all over you. The left just wants to protect the teachers unions and the right has a knee jerk reaction against anything done by the Federal govt except the military. Look at this chart to see how the US compares with other countries. I’m not sure why we are content to be well below the median for industrialized countries.
It is not that we are content, rather that many of us do not think that one size fits all.
I agree that we need a national minimum standard for the core subjects. However, once you get outside of reading and math - it blows up. Look at what a mess the national history standard became! Politics and beliefs and Political Correctness and Jingoism and and and…
BUT - a national standard, with standardized tests so that you know how your kid compares to others across your city / state / nation is a great plan. Teachers will teach to the test, of course. But if you create a proper test - that should not be a problem.
Grading the sucker could be tough, though. If you stick to multiple choice - easy. If you start adding in essays - it gets expensive to grade.
Local Control is critical. Parents need to feel that they have a say in their child’s education. If teachers are answering to the Feds and not to the parents, it will be problematic.
Here in Southern California there is a movement to split up the Los Angeles Unified School District. The Middle Class of the San Fernando Valley has different needs from the inner-city of Inglewood & Watts.
How will federalizing the education system solve that particular problem? Also, what problem do you see with that list? On the mean performance table the United States looks like it’s doing fine.
Why? Let’s take a look at who is at the top on the mean for performance math scale and a few closer to the United States.
Hong Kong: Pop. 7,000,000
Finland: Pop. 5,000,000
S. Korea: 49,000,000
Netherlands: 16,500,000
Liechtenstein: 34,000 (Yes, that’s thousand)
France: 64,000,000
Germany: 82,000,000
United States: 280,000,000 (as of 2000)
Given that we have such a huge population compared to the other nations ahead of us on that list I don’t think we’re doing so bad. Quite frankly I think it would be unrealistic to expect us to beat some place like the Netherlands who don’t have the diverse population that we do. I don’t even know where to begin when it comes to comparing us to Liechtenstein or Hong Kong.
Having a federally-run system is not a bad idea-France has such a system. The whole carriculum in french schools is run the french ministry of education, in Paris. One advantage: uniformity-you are sure that what;'s covered in 6th grade in Lyon is the same as what’s covered in 6th grade in Bordeaux. For all its defenders, theres a LOT wrong with the USA (decentralized0 system:
-local school boards are launching pads for ambitious politicians
-in rural areas, most people don’t support the schools
-lack of uniformity-which is why HS in Hookworm, Ark is substantially different than in Manhattan HS No. 21.
And for those of you in love with local school boards, their actions are many times wasteful and ineffective-which is why CARTER SCHOOLS (schools run without schoolboard interference) are the fastest growing category of schools.
Funding schools at the local level is also a problem simce it is based on the tax base of the local district. If you wanted to design a system more likely to perpetuate inequality in education you’d be hard pressed to do so.
Ah, yes, how we stack up to other countries. <sigh>
What difference does it make how we measure up to other countries? Are our factories unable to be filled with skilled workers? Are we unable to staff our corporations with qualified workers? Are we falling behind in scientific, political, social innovations? Do you see us unable to keep up with the rest of the world because of our poorly educated population?
And would ANYONE please explain how creating a massive federal agency would in any way make us better at educating our children? What massive federal agency have we implemented in the last 70 years (since the introduction of Rooseveltian federalism) that has done a substantially better job of providing services/benefits than the state agencies that were replaced? For that matter, in what way are we better at educating our children as a whole in the last 70 years as a result of attempts to federalize education?
I am not in any way a conservative when it comes to social legislation (I’m pretty middle of the road). But I do strongly believe that the federal government is there for a reason, and it isn’t to try and solve all the perceived ills in our society. If it was, then we should simply abolish states, get rid of federalism, and the thought of that quite scares me. :eek:
You should take a walk inside of Intel, Microsoft, Google and other high-tech companies sometime. They are full of foreign born engineers. American grad schools are the same: the number of foreign born and educated students is staggering. There just aren’t enough American students who are capable of participating in advanced degree programs in the tough fields.
That is certainly part of it. Some other pieces of the puzzle to consider, though:
-A crappy income for a middle-class American may be an awesome income for a middle-class Indian. If Microsoft is willing to recruit in India, they may be able to get away with paying each engineer $10,000 less annually than they would pay recruits from southern California.
-The United States youth culture considers success at school to be a bad thing: someone who’s too book-smart is a nerd. That’s a word that doesn’t exist in some cultures: it’d be like having a pejorative for someone who’s exceptionally athletic, as if the athletes at an American school were socially ostracized. Changing youth culture in this regard is not an easy thing to do.
I’m not convinced that federal control over education is a good thing (although I would like to see some standardization of costs/pupil, indexed to cost of living in an area, in order to maximize the chances that every kid gets a good shot at success). I’m student-teaching right now in a fourth grade class, and so much of what I do is focused on the end-of-grade tests mandated by No Child Left Behind. Kids aren’t learning how to write, for example: they’re learning how to write two-page papers that describe a day that begins normally, transitions into a fantasy event, returns to reality, and ends with a retrospective “As I look back on it now” paragraph. Almost everything we do is done with an eye toward those EOG tests, which is not beneficial for teaching.
