Throwing money at schools doesn’t work …
… if you don’t apply it in a thoughtful way. New York, case in point:
… New York public education is falling behind because the state has ignored chances to discover what educational practices really work, use that evidence to improve student outcomes, and make its leadership accountable for results.
While the state gathers troves of data, many of its most important programs are poorly measured or poorly evaluated.
For example, New York knows very little about its two fastest-growing programs: special education and school-based mental-health services. In New York, 21 percent of public school students are classified as having a disability, compared with the national average of 15 percent. The state has also opened more than 1,000 school-based mental-health clinics and hired counselors at a rate few other states can match. But it does not track if students are getting the services they need, if the programs are effective, or even if parents agreed to them.
Brilliant, just brilliant.
Similar problems dog New York’s tracking of individual students, teacher training programs, and the elimination of the infamous compulsory Regents exams of my youth. New York knows that charter schools are a good idea, but for political reasons they are very limited. And on and on and on.
It’s a choice to be mediocre, and to use money to fund Democrat constituencies in education rather than caring about education itself.
Decline is a choice. Blue cities chose poorly.
It is a feature
not a blue creature
the blue bug.
Is there a vaccine
to wipe out
this thing
the blue bug?
The monopoly New York School System should be replaced by a free market in the provision of educational services. funded by a simple Educational Endowment bestowed on each individual student.
Provision of educational services should look like what the demonopolized telecommunications industry has become, large intensively competitive high tech providers. These providers would be competing to offer educational services that worked, and that parents and students wanted
This ideal system would protect its users from poor teaching performance. If a student failed to exhibit minimum educational achievement, payment would not be made. Instead, it would accrue in the student account, providing twice the amount the next year to the provider who could catch the student up.
Seriously underperforming students would accrue several years of catch-up funding, providing extra incentive for the type of personalized attention that would benefit them. Military veteran servicemen and women teaching small groups of students, developing personal relationships, can change lost kids into enthusiastic young adults.
The funds would remain in the student account indefinitely, allowing dropouts to get an education as age and experience created the desire. The endowment would also provide funding for prison schooling, attracting providers who would adapt to the requirements.
Home schoolers whose students exhibited the required achievement would be paid.
Special needs students would still receive extra funding but at an individual level.
Opening educational services to the free market would allow for practical job-related instruction, and college level courses, to be included as providers fought for market share.
Competition among educational providers would make full use of technology, would provide useful training for actual jobs, and would deliver far more education for the same money. Gamification would keep students involved in ways that existing K-12 material can’t touch. The use of AI would allow the tracking of each bit of knowledge and understanding to be monitored at the individual student level and presented in various ways until understood.
The late 1970’s in the United States was a time of surprising deregulation. It was the beginning of the end for the telephone monopolies. Those inside the regulated industries, and the regulatory agencies, warned of doom and disaster if competition were allowed. The doomsayers were wrong. The free market provided solutions that were impossible to forecast. Competition and the profit motive brought out the best that humans can create.
Communications solutions today are employing far more people than the old phone monopolies, and are delivering services never dreamed of in that era. The forecasts of disastrous unemployment and system collapse if the phone monopolies were opened to competition were totally and completely wrong.
K-12 is the phone monopoly of our time.
It might have been the Wall Street Journal long ago chronicled the primary/secondary school mess in Kansas City. My memory is vague, but I believe because of racial disparities, the courts stepped in and took control of the budgets and much of the planning.
The result was this fabulous infrastructure (and fabulously expensive) and little focus on the actual teaching processes that matter to educating children. The student outcomes, or at least test scores, continued to decline.
I believe that Florida’s per capita state government spending is half what New York’s is.
That’s the way Democrats/Liberals/Progressives operate. The solution is some government program. No need to evaluate it. Head Start has been documented to have little or no long-term effect on student achievement—which was the reason for implementing it—but it has continued for 60 years. Head Start is now just a Jobs for the Boys (or more accurately, for the Gals) program these days.
Lack of effective research in Education is wide spread. I looked at 4 doctoral dissertations in Education written by people I worked with. Only one of them had numbers crunched to come up with a conclusion that could be tested for replication. The other dissertations were just stories.
Recall all the bogus stuff that AID was funding—and the Democrats’ howls of rage when that funding was cut off.