Because of a fluke caused by an epic literary illness, I got to be a last minute facilitator at our highschool Socrates discussion group yesterday. And because I was the facilitator, I had to be non-opinionated and refrain from arguing my thoughts. So now I'm going to voice them here.
The topic was on public education in this country...
With a recent national survey of dozens of major cities showing, on average, that the highschool graduation rate is only 75%, there is an obvious problem with the state of public education in this country. Now being homeschooled my entire life, I don't know what it's like in a public highschool, so I can't preach about the internal functions. What I do know is that competition breeds a desire to make one's self better, the more competition you have, the better and cheaper you will have to be to compete. Right now the public school holds a huge percentage of the education, while private, charter, and homeschools are the minority, the reason this is so, is because of money. Public school get tons of money from taxes and the government, where as, in comparison, private and charter school get very little, and homeschools get absolutely nothing(except maybe a 25% discount at the local bookstore). So it's generally a lot more expensive for a parent to send there kids to a private school verses a public school, therefor the private schools aren't big enough to compete with the public school system. So the solution that I think would work, is for the government to spread tax and grant money to ALL schools equally, based on the number of student attending. This would cause the school to be on a more equal level, making the schools compete for the enrollment of students, in turn forcing the schools to raise the bar when it comes to education, sports, and faculty, because parents will now have a choice of where so send their kids. Now since the schools will all be different, some with competent leaders and some without, and some putting more focus on one subject over another. The government needs to make sure our nation's generations are getting a complete education by implementing nation-wide standardized tests(like the ACT or SAT) that every student will need to pass to complete elementary, middle, and high school. So essentially education would free market capitalism style, with the government setting national standards.
Wow, that ended up a little longer then I thought. Please feel free to argue with me!
I agree with the bulk of this and with your general thesis. However, two points: First, while only a 75% graduation rate is a problem, there is a second problem: poor standards. The government's standards are so low that I can score in the top 7% of students and get scholarship money . . . but I almost never did ANY homework! Crazy.
ReplyDeleteSecondly, I don't like the idea of the government setting the standards (look at our standards now!) and deciding whether or not I pass or fail. Maybe on the school level this is fine, but what about homeschool? Some people have been trying to get the government to set standards for homeschooling parents and hold them accountable, when really it is parents who need to hold the government accountable for the way it schools.