For around $15000US dollars each, the MA bureaucrasy could send its students to Geelong Grammar School, Australia. A school that was good enough for Prince Charles, Rupert Murdoch and most of the South East Asian royalty. They would get a phenomenally better education than they do in the MA public system, for an equivalent amount of money – and you wouldn’t be sponsoring the bureaucrasy (something that I have a personal aversion to). See the school’s web site.

John Taylor Gatto wrote a short book titled, “Dumbing Us Down” that addresses what the public schools have done to this country and its people. Gatto was NY State Teacher of the Year in the early 1990’s – he resigned from teaching after concluding that the system was so broken that it could not be reformed or fixed from within. His grandchildren are home-schooled. While most Americans were homeschooled up until the late 1800’s, laws were enacted that made this basic educational choice illegal in all 50 states. Fortunately for me and my children homeschooling is now legal in all 5o states once again. In the 1970’s, many fathers and mothers risked being jailed and having their children given up to foster homes to win back this right. I was schooled in a corrupt, drug-ridden public school system in Dade County, Florida. I educated myself by reading books that I was interested in and biding my time until I was able to attend college. My children will hopefully never have to sit in any public school, if only as a matter of principle.

Speaking to the comments about education return on investment: someone posed the question of whether higher education resulted in reduced “life costs” such as health care and crime. I work for a publisher of scientific and scholarly books and journals, Walter de Gruyter. Our social science division, Aldine, has just published a book that specifically addresses this question. The title is “Education, Social Status and Health,” by John Mirowsky and Katherine Ross. You can pick it up on amazon here:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0202307077/qid=1052506914/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2/102-1458067-7236902?v=glance&s=books

These authors make the case that there is a definite correlation – interesting reading.

How is it that the private school systems manage to find “good teachers” and to produce good quality educations when it is so impossible to do the same in the public school system? Clearly, the world is not a black and white place, and so one has to make decisions based on shades of grey, but that doesn’t eliminate the need for cut off points. If you don’t like standardized testing, then you need to propose an alternative, not just throw up your hands and say it is hopeless to try to find a way to judge effective teaching. One reason why a competitive system is useful is that by competition, we find what works without having to theorize about it. Most high minded theories about how the government can intervene to solve social problems are so prone to failure because they fail to base themselves in real world hard facts, and they are so resistant when confronted with the facts.

As for the military, clearly there are limits to military spending, and wasteful spending in the military should be punished (just like wasteful spending in the public education system should be punished.) At least we can say this of the military: The proof is in the results. No one will bend a sympathetic ear to a representative of the military who aruges “well, it is just so hard to determine what victory is…maybe we won the battle and lost the war? This isn’t the type of resistance we wargamed against…” So when you want to pull out the old schill about wasting money on the military, be prepared to use the same standards you would apply to military results on other parts of the government. One important thing you learn in the military: “Sir, no excuse, Sir”

Nicholas, that’s gotta be a huge under-estimate of school-age population. Obviously, the U.S. population isn’t uniformly distributed, but if we back-of-the-envelope at 280 million people, 72 year average lifespan, then 13 years of that is 50 million K-12 kids. The U.S. Census Bureau says that there are “72 million kids”, (72/18*13) is 52, so I think we can assume that 50 is reasonable for order-of-magnitude estimates. $20k*50M is a lot of money, even in national budget terms.

I think we can also safely say that money is not the end-all solution to the education problem. I have friends who used to be teachers, and they didn’t leave because of the money. The Sausalito example, and I’ll bet Cambridge has issues for similar reasons, show that parental involvement is probably much more important.

Which leads us to the macroeconomic issue here: If you subsidize children, you’re offering parents a cheaper way to pass on their genes. It’s not like we’re short on people in this country (or even in this world), but what we want to encourage is quality, not quantity. We have to be extremely careful in our subsidies that we’re not offering incentives for the wrong thing.

In all the recent hullaballoo with Michael Jackson on ALL the networks , he was finally asked a question which sticks with me.

loose quote , ‘ Michael . . . do you ever just …. despair . . . of humanity ?’

long pause . . . . ” Yes .” was his answer .

High-minded people have dumbed down our public schools for all the most virtuous reasons. This doesn’t stop private-school kids, and home-schooled kids, from getting a real education. Yet any public school kid headed for college will be competing with private-school kids and home-schooled kids.

I would like to see better education for all our kids, college-bound or not. But when public schools treat “good” students as unpaid assistants in dealing with “difficult” ones, nobody ends up with a good education.

Theory: Teachers don’t want performance-based pay because “good performance” is so utterly subjective in the teaching profession. What makes a “good” teacher? The fact that all his/her students scored well on a standardized test? No, not necessarily. How about the fact that all the students like him/her? No, not that either. If we could agree on what a “good” teacher was, we’d fix public education. But, strange as it may seem, it’s probably best we never reach such consensus because, just as every student learns a little differently (some by listening, some by seeing, some by doing, etc.), we need every teacher to teach a little differently. Most things in the world come in all kinds of shapes and colors (people, businesses, political and economic systems), so why should public education be any different?

Up here in Ontario, Canada, the school boards typically have one administrative employee for every 4 teachers. You get the same complaints about having no funding, having to spend personal money on supplies, and lack of respect. But there’s plenty of money for a big, centralized school board building.

As a professional engineer, I cannot understand why the teachers don’t want to have performance based pay. My father in law (a retired English department head) once suggested something similar to Survivor. Every year the teachers vote one of their own off the
staff.

Another problem is the desire to have uniform test results as if all students are capable of the same level of learning. We might as well expect them all to attain the same height, or weight, or be able to do the same number of push-ups. Some kids are just smarter or dumber than others. It’s statistics!

Everyone complains about how the teachers have lost the will to teach. I say move over and let a motivated teacher take your place.

some quick numbers… with 11 million students in the 100 largest primary and secondary school districts (http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2002/100_largest/table_03_1.asp), i added a mil multiplied by $20k and came up with $240 billion. for reference, the military budget is approximately $400 billion, though this is likely not inclusive and contains things like $1000 toilet seats http://www.clw.org/milspend/dodbud03.htm…). the question ultimately arrives at a society’s priorities. it also, in my opinion, centers around return on investment. do we as a society benefit from better education? do we benefit from a huge military? does education-level correlate with a reduction in other costs such as health care and crime? imho as a person who pays lots-o-taxes, i would rather pay for education than receive a tax cut. though, going to parties in a tux to support scholarships has its soothing, defence-mechanism benefits.