Policy: Education
- Introduction
- Goals
- Motivations
- Recommendations
- Contentious Issues
File version: $Id: educatio.htm,v 1.3 2002/07/03 06:14:34 lars Exp $
Introduction
Goals
- Everybody should have an opportunity to receive an education according
to their inborn abilities
- 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.
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
- Schools should be held to verifiable performance standards, so that they
can be ranked, and non-performing schools must be analyzed and remedied
so that they can be made to perform.
- Parents must be given a choice of schools; in the best school systems,
each principal sets a different style, and some schools are a better match
for the needs of a given child than others. In a non-performing system,
it is grossly unfair to force parents to send their children to a school
that imparts no useful education to most of its students.
- Where there is no other mechanism to make a choice available, an acceptable
remedy may be to use public funds to pay (part of) the tuition to a privately
run school.
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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