The Department of Education is broken, there’s no doubt about that. As Linda McMahon takes the helm, the stated objective has been to close it down completely.
Our educational performance has declined relative to the rest of the world, in some cases reaching crisis levels, all under the oversight of the U.S. Department of Education.
Realistically, the U.S. may never be ranked number one in education. We are the quintessential melting pot, home to a diverse mix of cultures, including many who are new to the country and don’t speak English. This means our national average will never match that of homogenous countries like Finland or South Korea, where educational methods are efficiently tailored to a single culture. We may also find ourselves trailing behind China at times, given their selective approach to student performance statistics.
I can go into my speech on how diversity makes us richer, how the fusion of cultures enhances our food, music, art, science, and even business. And the evidence for our success is clear: we lead the world in culture, innovation, commerce and more.
Still, we need a strong national focus on education, even if the Department of Education is far from perfect.
What Should the Department of Education Do?
Two key things:
1. Testing
If you don’t test, you can’t measure. If you can’t measure, you can’t improve.
Students. We already have solid testing mechanisms in place for student, such as the SAT and ACT. While some universities have moved away from these tests due to concerns over bias, they still provide a strong foundation. Additional measures such as college acceptance rates, job placement success, and real-world competency in reading, writing, and math, could help refine our understanding of educational outcomes.
Teachers. More importantly, we must test teachers and this is a key component that we lack. The issue isn’t how intelligent they are, it’s whether they are effectively teaching their students. Are their students mastering the skills promised by the American education system? Teachers should be rated by how well their students are doing relative to their peers and in competition with other teachers.
Unions will fight this tooth and nail, for obvious reasons. But the reality is simple: ineffective teachers should be fired. Higher salaries may be warranted, but they won’t improve education if we can’t remove those who fail to do their job. In our editorial opinion, teacher’s unions have done more to sabotage our education system than any other factor.
Schools. We must also evaluate schools. Are they meeting the standards we set? From what I’ve seen, we already do a lot of this, and we do it well. Expanding school choice will only make these ratings more important, pushing the system toward continuous improvement. Compare budgets, hiring methods, administrative methods of successful versus unsuccessful schools. School evaluations in combination with the student and teacher evaluations means that states have a clear data for a path to remedies for bad schools, and for rewarding good ones.
2. Advice
The Department of Education should study the methods of successful schools and share them with struggling ones. Award-winning teachers could be incentivized to teach at underperforming schools for a few years through stipends or grants.
If we taught responsibility and work ethic at an early age, many later problems would take care of themselves. High schools should also teach basic finance and life skills, perhaps even earlier. Rote memorization has gone out of fashion, but without it (at least in some cases) the next level of learning is crippled.
The Bottom Line?
Fire everyone and start fresh – but keep a national focus on education. Keep a light touch, but provide honest and objective evaluations of our schools. Not too much budget, since too much money is coercive – states need to manage their own schools without the political whims of the Federal Government.
If we do this incorrectly without the objective measurements, then we are regressing toward and ever-decreasing mean. Ever seen the movie Idiocracy? But properly targeted tests can provide simplified feedback to the states as to how they are doing, and allow them to manage and implement the equivalent of Tony Robbin’s “Constant and Never Ending Improvement.
Let’s Make America Educated Again.
