Our public schools are overcrowded and over-spendy. According to this, per-pupil expenditures are over $10,000 per year in more than 23 states. And as the Wisconsin protests have shown, the teachers unions are clearly overloaded (if you have the time to ditch your students and commit fraud by getting fraudulent “doctors notes,” you are excess baggage). So, how to reduce costs and the number of teachers (and associated educational support staff) without loading vast numbers of students per classroom?
An idea I mentioned a while back: a standardized test in the 6th grade. Those who fail, or otherwise demonstrate an utter lack of interest or ability in getting an education, would be presented with the opportunity to Get A Damned Job. Let’s face it, lots of kids are wasting their time and your tax dollars screwing off in high school classrooms. So if we can take these students out of the picture and put them into some useful role in the economy, schools can get smaller (not to mention safer) and cheaper, and the economy will get a slight boost.
Now, there is the other end. I propose that starting at the sixth grade, a GED-type test be administered not to all students, but to all students who *want* to take it. Those that pass it can graduate on the spot (or at the end of the current school year), and get assured entrance to a state college or university. In order to help them, the student would recieve a college voucher for (handwave) $4000 for every year early they leave the public school system. So a student who graduates at the end of the sixth grade is leaving the system six years early… thus, $24,000 is made available to be spent on tuition at a state school of higher learning. For a state like Utah, this would represent something like $1000 per year of direct savings; but for a state like Vermont or Wyoming, this means more than $10,000 per year in savings. Some rational counselling system might be needed to assure that the younger graduates are actually ready for college.
Both approaches would incentivise students to *leave* the public educational system. On one hand, students who cannot benefit from the system and are a detriment to others. On the other hand, students who have already gotten from the system whatever the system has to offer. In both cases, students would be presented with the opportunity to leave a system that’s doing them no good… and get their lives underway. And by tempting these students out, the number of students could be substantially reduced, lowering costs. By chopping off the dead weight at the bottom and skimming off the cream at the top, the schools would be largely left with the great mass of Regular Average Students. By making the student body someone more uniform, with fewer outliers, the process of educating them should be made more practical.
9 Responses to “Education: a simple proposal”
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How about just giving the students $4K to go to a standards-based private school ? That would leave an additional $6K to be distributed among the ‘problem’ students.
Responses like: “politically unworkable” come to mind, but the real threat may
be in the stratification of society, the economic impact of an untrained workforce, the expectation that a 12-year-old has any clue what they want to do
for the rest of their life.
-G.
> the economic impact of an untrained workforce
We already have that. They’re called “illegal aliens,” and we have at least a dozen million of them. Most of them work in fields which could be staffed by minimally trained 14-year-olds. Making a few million uneducatable younguns available for basic labor (ag work, food prep, that sort of thing), perhaps via some form of revised FDR-era civilian work corp, would displace the economc need for the illegals. Take away the illegals source of income, and remind them via occasional deportations to Tierra Del Feugo that they’re not supposed to be here, and the problem will resolve itself via an un-migration.
> the expectation that a 12-year-old has any clue what they want to do
for the rest of their life
Face it: many 12-year-old will do *nothing* with the rest of their lives. Might as well put ’em to work. Might spur some of ’em to decide that maybe school might not be such a bad thing, and get back to it.
You proposal sounds like a more extreme version of the current german school system, which makes sense given that our current educational system is based on a 19th century german model. In the current german model however, excuse me it has been some time since I studied this back in college, students take a standardized test around 6th or 8th grade. That test determines whether they go on to univeristat (basically college prep high school) or if they enter apprenticeship programs. A student can retest at any time if they fail so that they can go into univerisitat. Those that do not are then given choices at to what field they want to apprentice in. They get On the Job Trainining (OJT) for several years, earning a paycheck before they once again test out of the apprenticeship and can earn a full paycheck or start their own business, whatever. Those that opt out of apprenticeship get the most menial jobs. But even those in the apprentice program learn more than just the trade they learn the history behind it, albeit specialized, and are much more skilled at their trade then someone who just goes and gets a 6 week certificate in it. For instance a barber in the US learns how to cut hair, beards, in a few different styles, etc… That same barber or hair dresser in germany would learn that and how to best cut a persons hair for their body/head type and shape, and how to do more historical cuts as well making them the equivalent of a hollywood hair specialist.
I have my own take on how the school system should be but will comment on that later.
I’m starting to think that vocational school should be required of all students. Forget PE
No one was ever a bad student in the 6th grade and then got better? At that age a child is nothing more than the person their parents made them, for better or worse. That seems unfair.
> No one was ever a bad student in the 6th grade and then got better?
Oh, sure. But lots of 6th graders aren’t bad students, they’re bad *people.* And yes, it may be unfair that they are what their parents made them. But everyone is what is what they… err, is. A rapist may be a rapist because someone mistreated him as a child. That’s sad. He’s also supposed to be locked up. Another kid may be dirt poor because his parents were drunken lazy bums, while another kid may be living in comfort because his parent won the lottery, and another may have been raised to wipe his ass with $100 bills because his parents were genius businesspeople. Again, unfair for the kid. Again, it doesn’t matter. People are (or at least should be) judged by what they do, not by who they come from or what happened to them in the past.
Anyway, if a 6th grader both flunks the tests *and* wants to bail out of school, I have trouble seeing what the problem would be in giving him/her a productive option, such as employment. If after a year of this he/she decides that education just might be a good idea, then they would be free to go back to 7th grade
I agree that troubled kids should get a hard job for a while that teaches discipline, honor, and a desire to do good work. That is something that no one, even the well educated, seems to have anymore. To put a positive spin on your plan, there is a program like this in New York City called City as School (yes there may be liberal elites involved but bear with me.)
In this, HS students who are academically average or somewhat below average, continue to take classes but they also apprentice into blue collar jobs and learn skills they will need to stay off welfare later on. It often helps them wake up, grow up, and find something that they care about. But at no time is anyone leaving a school, or stopping the learning process. It is just customized to fit.
Here comes the bad part: taxes have to pay for some of these schools. Yes money that God intended to be spent on guns and Escalades, but people will have to give some of their money up. And much of this money will pay greedy teachers who, with master’s degrees, will want mid 5 figure salaries. (Since you can make 100K working at a pharmacy counting pills or 150K doing geology for an oil company.)
How do I justify all this taxation? Educated people are less likely to shoot me, rob me, require welfare, and live with expensive diseases like diabetes. A well educated public costs less to maintain, and education becomes a good investment. Suddenly $10,000 per student does not seem quite so bad compared to the cost to keep a criminal in jail for a year ($29,000) or treat diabetes ($6,000 a year, for decades.)
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Better yet, let’s just ship them all off to Africa or Asia, not that we have any manufacturing or lettuces picking job here anyway…. Come to think of it making Soylent Green out of little youglings would taste better than making them off old bones.