If education's the key, how do we improve it?

[Alan Bolte]

Seems like every thread that comes up about how to fix this or that problem with US society, half the responses say to improve education. Problem is, how? Especially, what could you submit to Congress, or even in just one state to start with (mine could use some help), that might actually fly? Issues I can think of:
Teachers - there aren't all that many of them in relation to student population, but there might be enough, I don't know. Some are alright, some are chickenshit, very few are good enough to take a kid going one direction in life and make him go another.
Funding: there seems to be an awful lot of money flowing, and a lot of complaints about a lack of money, or a lack of equity due to property taxes. Is this even an issue? Or is the money just poorly spent?
Parents/culture: I think we all know why the black kids and the poor kids don't do so well as the white rich kids.
Standards: No high-school graduate should be illiterate. That's fucking insane. Are standardized tests really the best way to solve this? Are teachers necessarily to blame?

I ask this from the position of a high school senior in the best school in a district recently out of academic emergency.

[TheFeniX]

I would say the main thing is to get kids more interested in learning rather than using High School as an excuse to sport the latest fasions and generally make asses of themselves.

Too bad I have no clue how to get your average teenager interested in an institution I used to it's fullest, but still hated with a passion.

[Soontir C'boath]

At least start the damn school day around 8 or 9 AM so we can all get enough damn sleep to care about school. At these current days....I can barely stay awake in my classes to give a flying crap about it.~Jason

[Asst. Asst. Lt. Cmdr. Smi]

I'd say spend more time on math, science, reading, and history. And perhaps geography, it's embarrasing to have a population that learns where places are from "Survivor".

I think the biggest problem is with the inner-city schools. What the students need there is better equipment, better teachers, and more incentive to graduate (Although I think that being able to get a degree, and perhaps find a better job and get out of the ghetto would be incentive enough)

[Montcalm]

Getting rid of every boring teacher would be a good start.

[Joe]

More money isn't the answer. We've been pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into education every year with no improvement, which inevitably leads to calls...for more money.

[Solauren]

Bribe'em (expensive, but it would work)

or
Uni-sex school uniforms. Now they are not going for a fashion show
Fine parents for there kids not going to school.
Punishements at schools result in revoktion of drivers liscence.
If possible, pass a law making it illegal to hire a high school student with less then a 80% average.
Can't get your drivers liscence without a high school diploma (ouch) and a 70% minimum average in your final year
(That would hit most teenagers where it hurt the most)

[Gandalf]

In Australia, our biggest call is more money, which leads to teacher's pay and resources for the schools. All of the teachers I have dealt with have been dedicated people, and if there the job conditions improve our education quality would improve.

The only other thing I can think of is having some basic standards before people go up grades, I knew people in the sixth grade who were basically illiterate, and I know people in year 9 who don't know Pythagoras.

[RedImperator]

If possible, pass a law making it illegal to hire a high school student with less then a 80% average.

Do you have some kind of brain malfunction that compels you to include at least one horrible violation of a huge segment of the population's fundamental rights in every "how do you improve society" thread?

By the way, what happens to people who didn't have an 80% average? They live off the state? We leave them to starve in the street? Do employers now have to request transcripts before they hire anybody?

[Gandalf]

Can't get your drivers liscence without a high school diploma (ouch) and a 70% minimum average in your final year
(That would hit most teenagers where it hurt the most)

What would this really accomplish? My mum dropped out of high school, for personal reasons, and therefore got no diploma, she is actually now somewhat high up at a big insurance firm, whilst raising 2 children.

Your solutions are just punishing students for problems in the system.

[CelesKnight]

More money, more rigor, more teachers, more discipline, more testing, more.....

There are a lot of things that the government can do to improve the education system. But I suspect that none of them will be good enough for what we want/need/deserve/pay-for.

I think that the underlying issue is that our society just doesn't value education enough. Education is viewed as a 8-3 task. Nights are for TV, weekends are for friends, and the summer is for play or burger-flipping. If we truly want a well-educated society, I think that we need to improve schooling a little, but more importantly recognize that education doesn't start or end on the schoolhouse steps. Unfortunately, I have no idea how that could be enforced without radically altering how we view society.

[Loki]

Seems like every thread that comes up about how to fix this or that problem with US society, half the responses say to improve education. Problem is, how?

Care to enlighten me as what these problems with society are?

[Johonebesus]

First thing I would do is even out funding. It is absurd that there are poor schools and rich schools. Instead of letting counties fund their schools or worse, the state basing funding upon local property taxes, all schools should get the same amount of money per student, period. There is no excuse for one school having all the latest equipment and fancy communications labs and computers while another school can't even afford to buy enough textbooks.

However, the biggest problem is that our society does not value education. Teachers get little money and less respect. Children who do well in school are called nerds, even by adults. Parents often place more emphasis on sports than academics, when they think about school at all. Children see their parents ridicule "eggheads." School is only encouraged so far as the diploma will lead to a good job. Education simply is not a priority for our society, and until that changes, the educational system will just get worse and worse.

[Knife]

Education can be tackled on multiple fronts. Teachers, students, money, standards.

First off, a top down restructuring of the education system needs to happen. The Department of Education needs to be sliced down to a small department that deals with school standards for both teachers and students and stay at that size. Those before mentioned standards are now the litmis test on if a school recieves federal funds. If a school, either students or teachers, can not make the grade then the school looses the cash until it can hang.

Teachers get a serious pay raise, what it is is region specific but a 100% increase is a good start. Time to start paying them what they are worth and if they are worth nothing and can't pass the standards, there're gone.

Students who can not make the standards are held back or the parents are given the opertunity to place them in private school. If little Jonny can't read after third grade, then Jonny stays in third grade until he can. Obviously, special ed classes will still be available for special cases though.

More or less, the way the system is set up, it would work. It only needs to be enforced. But that could be said with alot of things in America. Its always easier to make new laws instead of enforcing old ones.

[Alan Bolte]

Care to enlighten me as what these problems with society are?

Well, hey, not like there's anything new, or anything we need lose sleep over. But there's crime (see the Violent Crime thread), there's welfare/minimum wage families that never go anywhere, there's people generally being idiots, thus annoying me, and any complaint about our government eventually leads to talking about our uneducated, sheeplike populace.

[Gil Hamilton]

Well, for one thing, we need much better teachers. As it is right now, the pay is terrible unless you've been in the system for 20 years, aggrivating, has few benefits, and increasingly is become hazardous (we've had at least one teacher in a local high school who was fired because she grabbed a students wrist to prevent said student from pounding on someone). One thing that needs to be done is pay raises. Start paying teachers a decent salary and give them some actual benefits. You know, make their's a job that is actually worth the aggrivation. As it is, people who are qualified to teach high school now wouldn't bother... they can do better elsewhere.

Also, finding competant leadership in Boards of Education is a must. There needs to be rigorous high standards for people who are on school systems Board. For instance, while the Pittsburgh Public School District was a decent enough school system, it was very very much in spite of our Board of Education, who were the crummiest bunch of idiots around. Part of the problem there is anyone who has the necessary business and administration skills to manage the School District properly would have shit themselves laughing at any offer to run the School District, since they can make far more money elsewhere with more perks and less hassle, so we get boobs like Ron Suber who, despite his incompetance, wasn't fired until he got busted for statuatory rape. There needs to be some way to get competant people in Boards of Education, and that's the truth.

Also, equipment and textbooks needs to be updated, you know, every five years. High school students are beasts to their textbooks and when you get a textbook that's a few years old, it's a very sorry thing indeed. The thing is written all over, their is a tendency for many missing pages, covers get ripped off. Plus, the information in books like social studies and science books can get out of date. I had an Earth and Space Textbook that was talking about the upcoming Viking II mission to Mars and I don't think I've every had a social studies textbook that didn't refer to Gorbechev as the current leader of the USSR. That's sad.