What is wrong with public schools and how do we fix them?

Graduation Rates in our public schools are deplorable. America’s Promise sponsored a study of the 50 largest cities and learned that only 70% of all students nationwide are receiving diplomas. In our inner cities it is even worse. Detroit has a graduation rate of 24.9%, Indianapolis 30.5%, Cleveland 34.1%. Even the best districts in the survey Mesa, San Jose, and Nashville were only at 77%.

I’m sorry but even the best cities in this survey were unacceptable. I believe that even a 90% success rate would be unacceptable. That would be 1 out of every 10 kids failing to graduate. Although, I guess today that would sound pretty good.

Our schools are failing. They have been in decline for several generations now and it is totally unacceptable. The worst schools are all in districts that have been controlled by Democrat party for many generations. They’re always coming up with the same reasons for their failures. They always need more money. I have news for you, they will never have enough money and if we doubled the money that is spent on education today we still wouldn’t get any better results.

Imagine if General Motors tried that approach. I promise to get you a better car tomorrow if you would just pay me more for the one I’m selling you today? Do you know what you would do if they tried something like that? Well, you’d run right over to Ford, or Chrysler, or Toyota and buy a different car and you wouldn’t go back to them until they got their act together.

Unfortunately the fact is districts controlled by Republicans are only slightly better. They generally reside in the suburbs and have parents that are more involved than we have in the inner cities. So they typically get better results albeit not great results either.

Teachers are not incompetent (well maybe a small percentage of may be) but the system they are in is broken. Government monopolies are doomed to be inefficient at best and incompetent at the worst. Bureaucrats are not out to improve productivity they are all about protecting their own jobs.

Well what are we going to do about it? We cannot let this continue, it will not get better. The problems are systemic and we have to reconsider our ideas on how to get good education.

We spend more money per student than any other country in the world. The children in this country should be the smartest and best educated children on the planet.

The solution is capitalism. It is what has made this country the greatest country in the history of the world. We have to infuse competition into our schools and make them compete with each other.

We need to stop funding schools and start funding children. We are spending about $10,000 per student nationwide. You give that money to the parents in the form of a voucher and the parents are free to put their kids into whatever type of school they believe will do the best job educating them.

All kids learn differently so why are we trying to find a one size fits all version of a school for every child. It makes no sense what so ever.

Now, I know it’s not practical to send every kid from all of the inner city high schools to 1 or 2 really goods schools in the suburbs that may be 30 miles away. Some parents still wouldn’t be able to send their kids to a better school because they don’t have the means to transport them to a school so far away.

We need to stop looking at schools as buildings. Schools should just be a collection of teachers. Think of a school building as something similar to a mall. Where different schools can setup shop in the same building.

The different schools can share resources. Perhaps they could take turns using the gym, cafeteria and the auditorium. Split the cost proportionately for the heat electricity and the water.

We can have a boy’s school, a girl’s school, a boot camp type school and a religious school all under one roof. We could have secular schools, college prep schools, music schools and schools that focus on athletics. We could also have schools that have more hands on style of teaching and schools that focus on gifted children.

Some schools may offer free busing for their students others may promise a new laptop to for every student. Some may require kids to wear uniforms. Others may have a 3 hour homework session in the building right after class.

There will be all sorts of different possibilities. I don’t know what the final mix will turn out to be and that doesn’t matter right now. What matters is that parents and children will make these decisions based on what fits their children the best.

Let the free market go to work and watch what happens. Three important things will happen:

1 - Kids will get better educations.
2 - Teachers will get better pay
3 - Someone will be making a profit.

You say how can this be? Surely if someone makes a profit from this then won’t they actually be taking money away from our kids? I don’t believe so; I believe that we are that inefficient today. Do the math. Even at 20 kids per class at 10,000 dollars per kid. That is 200,000 dollars per class. Teachers barely make about 50,000 per year. What is happening to the rest of the money? Books, supplies, surely school buildings don’t cost that much to operate?

Now of course we’ll have to have some type of watchdog group looking over all of these different schools to ensure that they are meeting some minimum standards. But I feel confident that even the worst of these schools will be an improvement over what we have today.

To get this started we could break up the schools sort of like the government broke up AT&T. We can have different principals and department heads get together and form individual companies. Now obviously every company would be structured differently, but I think that we could structure teachers’ salaries with incentives and performance bonuses.

Of course the worst performing schools would end up getting the least customers and be forced to either cut their costs or go out of business. At which point a new company would come in and try something different, perhaps something that has been successful in other areas.

I don’t know how it will play out in the long run. Maybe we’ll have a big three like the auto industry. Or maybe it’ll be like the restaurant industry were we have national chains along with local little specialty schools. I think it would be exciting to see how it all plays out.

We could start a trial program in Detroit they seem to be in the biggest mess and in no time we should see some marked improvements from them. The important thing is that we have to be sure that we truly get government out of the decision making process. After that it would spread just like wildfire across the country.