Some provocative, even anarchic, suggestions:

Part I: Take the government out of it as much as possible. This means:
1. Eliminate all state and federal departments of "Education," "Public Instruction," etc.
2. Eliminate all federal funding of education.
3. Eliminate all existing federal and state laws/regulations that dictate what schools, teachers, and students must do other than #4,5,6 below.
4. Pass a Constitutional amendment that prohibits the Federal Government from interfering in education other than to protect other constitutional rights.

Part II: Make education a part of the real world, rather than a substitute for it.
5. Prohibit anyone from going to college unless they have had at least three years of full time "real world" experience via job, military, Peace Corps, etc.
6. Prohibit anyone from teaching college students unless they have had at least five years of such full-time experience and have at least one "practical" skill (welding, plumbing, carpentry, computer repair, cattle care and feeding, etc.
7. Prohibit anyone from teaching secondary school who has not taken at least a year of college-level math, a year of college-level history, an accounting course, and who cannot converse in an everyday way in at least two languages.

And, part III:

8. Eliminate compulsory public education. Period.

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Wade do you see what they use as basic math in college? I had to take a class and it was like 6th grade math. Seriously they were teaching addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. They had very basic alegbra. The worst part of it all was that these kids just coming from high school were lost because they couldn't use a calculator. It was embarrassing seeing the future leaders of our community not be able to figure out how to add or subtract without a calculator.

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Aaah one of my other pet peeves - teaching the use of calculators instead of the nuts and bolts of basic math.

I taught my oldest daughter math up through multiple digit multiplication and long division before she ever entered kindergarten; She also was reading at a 4th grade level before kindergarten.

Both teaching my own kids and as a long term substitute, I taught kids algebra and geometry more effectively than anybody else around. Yet I could never be a math teacher because you have to pass some huge total of higher level math. I hit a ceiling at first year calculus and just couldn't handle those - something about when it left the concrete and became too theoretical. Oh well!

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Wade, when you start using the word "prohibit", you leap the chasm big-time from "anarchic" to intrusive government.

A lot of the quite radical stuff you say sounds good to me - including your bottom line. So much CRAP is taught nowadays that requiring it is almost laughable. On the other hand, you have the babysitting element. A LOT of kids without permission and only slightly less kids with parental permission would take you up on that fantastic offer - "you mean I can skip school and they won't come and get me?" Where are they gonna be? On the street making trouble? flooding the job market? entering the judicial system instead of the educational system?

As much as I value and respect that "real world" stuff you mentioned, I think it isn't necessary to being a good teacher. Having a lot more emphasis and availability of skilled trades learning/vocational courses would be a good idea, though - and NOT making nearly as much academic stuff required to get into those. Somebody once said, a good teacher can read the book one day ahead of the students, and teach them just fine. As a substitute teacher, I literally did that a few times.

My first year of Debate in high school, Federal Aid to Education - which was just beginning then - was the topic. As is the custom in competitive debating, I learned to argue both sides of the question. Bottom line: yeah, we would be better off without it, but the powers that be would just get to the same places by a different route - no significant difference, at least not the great majority of locations around the country.

I agree with your #7 except the foreign language thing - superfluous IMO.

Most of your ideas remind me of the old thing I advocated even before H. Ross Perot advocated something similar: conducting legislation entirely by referendum - his computer terminal idea would have made it doable, but ...... THEN who has all the power - once the legislating politicians are eliminated? The God damned news media - also the answer to the question, what's the only thing rottener than politicians? Making education more down-to-earth and in the hands of regular people would mostly just empower a new class of influence peddlers who just might be more insidious than the current ones - better the devil you know ......

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Ah...I should have said "a year of calculus." :)

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I am very adamant that if we raise our children better and educate them better, WE as a nation will be better.

I have a very analytical personality and am amused while observing trends and what not. Some of the things I've experienced have me scratching my head thinking, if I can see this, why isn't anyone else? Perhaps others are and they aren't doing anything about it?

I am not one of those people who speaks loudly and does nothing about it. I'm extremely proactive with the schools my girls attend to the point their principal's know me well. If they are doing something I disagree with, they will know about it. I went the rounds with teacher after teacher telling them how idiotic it was to allow social networking access on their schools network. And you know what, some of the teachers said they "needed" it. When I asked them how, I completely blasted their reasoning out of the water. I told them it was an unnecessary no reward distraction. Repeatedly I was told they are young adults and should have self discipline. Are you freaking kidding me? These kids are between 14-18 and you expect them to display self control that most twice their age fail to do?

I do agree with their premise that to trust someone you have to give them an opportunity to build that trust. However, as I said, there is no reward for allowing Facebook. Those little teenagers use Facebook for attention, and drama and it spirals out of control. It should be blocked, period.

The High School principal told me they have it blocked and I said about what about the secured connection (HTTPS). Yep, that's how kids were accessing it and he had NO DAMN CLUE. He thanked me for the heads up. Some teachers say they need Facebook. Okay, so be it. Create permission roles then. Admin, Teacher and Student on your network proxy. IT IS NOT DIFFICULT TO DO!!! Students have NO ACCESS to social networking whereas admin and teachers DO.


Teacher Evaluation
As for teachers. The whole grading system is GARBAGE! I do not like paying their health benefits and I feel teachers should be compensated more via their earned salary.

I do not agree with how the teachers are evaluated for wage compensation either. The better their students do grade wise, the better teacher they are presumed to be. I flipped a bird when Lydia's teachers, one after another told me they give her the answers and they give a pre-test that is actually the real test. This is NOT educating. This is NOT learning. This is giving them every opportunity to earn a HIGH grade, rather than encouraging them to LEARN the material.

Grading
Grading should be done interdependently. Hey, there's a job market right there for ya. Teachers have NO incentive to grade hard on their students, none at all because if they have 20 students and 15 have D's or F's, it is assumed they are a bad teacher. Personally, I would rather my girls EARN a C and know the material very well than be given an A and be clueless. And do not think for a second this doesn't happen, it does!

School Duration
School should also be year round. Kids aren't needed to tend to the family farm anymore so the summer break is unnecessary. Summer break fragments the educational system and serves no benefit. Start school on the 2nd Monday of January (Jan 13th) and end it the Friday (Nov 21st) before Thanksgiving. That gives teachers nearly two months to do grades and prepare for the following year while giving both teachers and students plenty of time off to celebrate the "Holiday Season" as well.




Personally, I also think (and this is admittedly unethical) we should have every kid medically blocked from having kids until a certain age. I believe and strongly feel one of the issues we have with children is that children are trying to raise children.


If we raise our children better and they are more adequately educated, guess what happens. We become better from top to bottom.

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Seems to me they are more concerned today about kid's "self asteem" then actually TEACHING them something.
Back when I was a kid, if a child acted up in class, there were concequences. Now, if a kid acts up, they want to drug them to control them.
I remember in junior high, when a boy kept causing trouble.
The teacher had warned him, and told him to straighten up. He didn't, and the teacher kicked the kid's desk, causing him to almost fall over. The boy jumped up, fists clenched, ready to attack. The teacher told him to throw a punch, that the first one would be his.
"Either hit me, or sit down and knock it off"
The kid never acted up again.
If that happened today, with all the kids feeling "entilted", the kid would come back and shoot up the place, or have his parents call a lawyer and have the teacher kicked out.
"You are SPECIAL and have RIGHTS" is what is taught. Not "There are consequences for your actions".
I would NOT want to be a teacher in today's public schools.

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It's a long time since I paid attention to the school situation "up north" in Wisconsin, but back in the day, one reason or justification for summer vacation was - believe it or not - so they wouldn't have to put air conditioning in the schools. I don't know why - maybe I'm still just a kid at heart, but for some reason, I don't like the idea of year around school - even with the enhanced Christmas vacation you described.

As I said previously, a lot of what is wrong with education is THE STUDENTS - as both Z2C and Cheesey kinda implied, and the reason for that is there are way too few good parents - and the reason for THAT is the modern culture and attitude of pervasive change in the country in general. To say any more would slip into that evil realm of politics .......

Yeah, many teachers and administrators don't have a clue - in a variety of ways. Perhaps worse, though, is that many of them THINK they do have a clue, and thus, put forth a bunch of horrible crap - like the social networking thing - that, in addition to the obvious potential for bad deed doing, detracts from teaching the nuts and bolts of material - reading, writing, 'rithmetic, science, history, and a VERY limited etc. Much as I don't like regulating from above in terms of curriculum, it probably is necessary because so many teachers are the type of psycho-babble loons who would depart too much from the norm to ....... let's just say, crap.

I still say, classroom management - the educator's euphemism for discipline - is the greatest need/shortcoming, and that my previously mentioned solution of disciplinary aides in each room would help greatly in fixing that.

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