Policy: Education

File version: $Id: educatio.htm,v 1.3 2002/07/03 06:14:34 lars Exp $

Introduction

Goals

Motivations

"Everybody should have an opportunity to receive an education according to their inborn abilities"

It is a cornerstone of democracy, that in order to govern themselves, the people must be informed and competent to make decisions of governance. This requires a basic education for everybody.
Opinions vary about the extent of public education needed: Elementary, secondary or college level education. The US concensus is at least secondary level ... but the quality of that education varies greatly. My own belief is that society gains much by ensuring that no talent is wasted.

Except for the mentally disabled, every student should receive 13 years of schooling, and at the end of that time, either be prepared to enter college or to be placed in a productive employment where they can earn a living for themselves.

Except for the number of years, this basic statement of purpose for public schooling would go without saying in every one of the countries with which we routinely compare our own.
The consequences to society of a school system that every year graduates tens of thousands of illiterate, unemployable young people are devastating, and show up in statistics of homeless, and in crime statistics.

Recommendations

Contentious Issues

Social Promotions

When a young man or woman in their senior year of high school turns out to be functionally illiterate, it is clear that something went wrong much earlier. To ensure that such problems are discovered and corrected as early as possible, the school system should have standardised tests at regular intervals, and when students are found not to function at the grade level commensurate to their age, they should not be blindly "passed on" to the next grade, to be warehoused in a classroom where the teaching is at a level that they are not prepared for. To do so, would only perpetuate the problem and hamper the learning environment for everyone else. Yet, it is clear that many schools have done exactly that. Recently, some cities have declared  a policy of "no more social promotions": that they would no longer promote students to the next grade unless a basic competency test showed them to be performing at grade level. Unfortunately, the places where such a pledge was necessary, this has turned out to be unworkable: In Chicago, only a tiny minority of children were at grade level. In Los Angeles, about half the children would be held back under such a policy. But since the classes were already overcrowded, the result of such a policy would be that schools could not accept new students into their beginning grades, and such policies have largely been proven unworkable.

Vouchers

Since most private schools are affiliated with churches, many liberal organizations hae argued that any system under which a government pays tuition to a church school is a violation of the Us constitution (first amendment), since in their opinion it constitutes an "establishment" of a religion sanctioned by government.
I believe that so long as the payments are LESS than the expenditure that would have resulted if the child had stayed in the public school, this is not a subsidy to a religion, but a cost-saving measure similar to the way in which the cleaning of public buildings is often performed by private companies rather than government employees.
Of course, these private schools should be held to the same standards of competency as the public schools; be subject to the same standardized tests, and the same standards of curriculum as the public schools.
Based on my experience in Denmark, where such a system has been in effect for over a hundred years, I predict that most parents would send their children to public schools, unless the public schools were clearly unusable, and that most private schools would soon be secular. The only reason that most private schools have been church-affiliated until now, is that only a strong religious conviction has motivated parents to pay the full tuition (after they already paid for the public schools through their taxes), and only religious conviction has motivated teachers to work for lower pay in private schools. With public reimbursement rates at 85% of the public expenditure per student, many secular schools would likely be able to apply better management and be profitable at a lower cost than the public schools.
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