Education in America? The Three Easy Steps We Don't Want to Take!

So much hand-wringing about the woeful state of American education.  We just can’t figure it out. 

But don’t worry: I had a few minutes here and thought I would jot down the three things we can do to make education work. A bake sale is practically more complicated, but few people want to bake up a batch of this.

1)      Decrease class sizes to about 12 students.  Nearly every educational study shows that more individualized attention gets better results from students.

2)      Pay teachers more—a lot more.  Start them at about $60,000/year, and establish a merit-based ceiling of around $100,000/year.  The reason is obvious.  Despite what some believe, kids are not stupid.  If we don’t put resources toward their schooling and appear not to care about it, they are less likely to care, too.  Kids know when they have a smart teacher in front of them, and they know when they have a lifer who has a calendar in the teachers’ lounge that he uses to cross off the days until his or her retirement.

3)      In exchange, insist that the teachers unions do away with tenure.  It is a reasonable exchange for a dramatic pay raise.  In the teaching field we will suddenly have something Americans worship: competition!!  And we will end up with smarter, more inspiring teachers drawn by compensation that convinces them that society takes their job seriously.

But—and here it comes—how to PAY for all this “luxury”?  You can choose your source, depending on your political stripe (I should say “warp”, these days).  Personally I like taking ten percent of the defense budget, about fifty billion dollars, to get the ball rolling; I like a gas tax, too, one that would go straight to teachers in all states.  The real point in the “funded mandate follies” is that we need the WILL to do this.  If we have that, we are home free.  It’s the easiest and hardest ingredient to find for this recipe.  Those who throw up their hands and say, “No can do!” are the people who are in the long run the most willing to see the U.S. as a third world country with lots of generals but not many engineers and scientists. 

Which is okay, I suppose, as long as the choice is made consciously, and no one is later snapping his fingers and exclaiming, “I could have had a K through 12!”  If it’s going to be important later—it’s important RIGHT NOW.