Education REFORMED?!?!?!? by ~BIGMATT~

Have you ever had a teacher that was so incompetent that you felt that you were wasting your time by sitting in class? On the other hand, Do you remember that great teacher you had that made you feel special, made you feel like you could do anything? What one teacher do you remember the most? Was it the one that made you feel like you could achieve greatness, or was it the one that made you feel like you were wasting your time? For most of us, the teacher that made a positive influence was from grammar school. And unfortunately, the later teacher we can remember from our collegiate or high school years. Whatever happened to “you get what you pay for"? Now I do not mean to sound so harsh. Yes, we are giving the college thousands of dollars to learn the skills we need for either continuing education or a career. But what about our kids? We pay thousands of dollars in taxes every year to fund the public schools. And since we are funding those schools, shouldn’t we have some say as to what goes on in them? My daughter’s fourth grade teacher, Paul Plumb, is a great teacher. He is one that I would gladly pay to have to teach my kids. If it were up to me, every teacher would be like him. Yet too many times, we end up sending our kids to school to be taught by someone who has a bunch of initials after their name, and no real life experiences. They can talk a good talk, but most of them are still trying to learn how to walk. If we are paying these so called teachers, shouldn’t we be the ones giving them the interview for the job? I mean come on, we are entrusting them with our children’s well being, right? And since we pay their salaries, shouldn’t we be the ones able to fire the bad ones? Yet, this is not the case. And in most schools, the average salary for a teacher is the same across the board for the bad teachers as with the good teachers. Who’s to say which ones deserve the job? We need a system that would allow new teachers to have to earn their stripes, if you will, before they make the money that teachers like Mr. Plumb deserve. This way, we could give to those teachers who deserve the money, the money they well earned. This would help to weed out the teachers with poor teaching skills. And make the teachers who really want to teach, strive for their salaries and tenures. A good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers. Your child is actually better off in a "bad" school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. The students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year's worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half's worth of material in the same amount of time. Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before. It needs an apprenticeship system that allows candidates to be rigorously evaluated. Given the enormous differences between the top and the bottom of the profession, you'd probably have to try out four candidates to find one good teacher. That means tenure can't be routinely awarded, the way it is now. An apprentice should get apprentice wages. But if we find eighty-fifth-percentile teachers who can teach a year and a half's material in one year, we're going to have to pay them a lot—because we want them to stay. The notion that smaller classes would make better classes is a deeply held article of faith in American political and policy circles. Politically popular, class-size reductions are especially welcomed by teachers.

Smaller classes mean higher demand for teachers, resulting in more jobs and higher pay.

Smaller classes mean smaller workloads. It is more effective to have a good teacher in a large class than a poor teacher in a small one. Better students tend to be found in larger classes because schools adjust class size to student behavior. A few researchers, most notably Eric Hanushek of the University of Rochester, have found that teacher quality is the most important variable in determining educational outcomes for the typical school. Blanket policies of class-size reduction are inefficient and wasteful. A targeted approach would be best. The primary theme of education reform should not be class-size reduction. Instead, the focus should be on improving teacher quality. Stricter hiring and promotion standards for teachers should be coupled with higher teacher salaries. It is wasteful to spend money on all students when the greater benefits of class-size reduction only accrue to disadvantaged or special-needs children. How can we improve education in the United States so that the new century will not end as the last did, with the United States falling consistently behind other countries in student performance? The answer, in a nutshell, centers on teachers. Without improving the average quality of our teachers, there is little hope of improving the system. The evidence suggests that child behavior is very sensitive to teacher quality. Data from the Texas Department of Education provide authoritative evidence that good teachers improve the quality of the classroom experience and raise performance scores. The biggest obstacle here is that teacher quality is not closely related to any characteristic on which salaries are based. The solution is to have a large pool of applicants, a flexible turnover policy based on teacher performance, and higher teacher salaries to attract the pool and compensate for a reduction in job security. More competition is needed in the educational arena.

Allowing a choice, so that students could move from failing schools to more successful ones, would be helpful. The money could follow the students, allowing failing schools to be replaced by more successful administrators and teachers, who would take over the same physical classrooms.

To conclude, we need to improve our education system. And in order to improve our schools in the twenty-first century, it is first necessary to attract more high-quality teachers. This can only be done by improving their compensation and by introducing a type of marketplace accountability into the system. Competition should be allowed to prevail so that the weak aspects of the educational establishment can be eliminated. Enabling the best part—talented, well-prepared teachers—to flourish. We need to implore the governor and our senators to re-instate those funds that have been cut from our education system. Those funds are needed to acquire the good teachers, like Mr. Plumb of Pueblo Del Sol Elementary School which I have spoken about.

“Teach a child HOW to think, not WHAT to think.” - Sidney Sugarman