Reboot II

I noted in the previous post that the public education system needs a reboot to get a fresh start.

To use another metaphor, the public school system needs to be declared bankrupt so it can be restructured, eliminating all the conditions that drove it into bankruptcy in the first place.

The primary reason for the reboot, as opposed to less drastic measures, is to extinguish all the bad contracts, obligations, and relationships they've entangled themselves in and have had thrust upon them by political means.

As I pointed out in the previous post, after the great reboot of aught nine you'd have students, teachers, buildings, equipment/instructional material, and existing funding. All that is needed is to restructure the relationship between these existing elements so the incentives are better aligned while avoiding the mistakes of the present system.

So how should the system be rebuilt?

Power to the People

The first, and most important, fix is to return the power to the people. Education funding should go directly to the students to spend on education services as they see fit. One way to do this would be to set up education savings accounts for each student, like medical savings accounts, that can only be used for education services.

People pay taxes for education. A certain percentage of those taxes go to fund the education for the benefit of the public. But a person should a get a credit for a percentage of the taxes they pay each year that goes into their education savings account for at least the benefit of their own children's education. The idea is to provide parents (and students) control over their children's education commensurate with resources they've contributed into the system free from interference from the government or otherwise. To the extent that students are being subsidized from public funds, then it is likely that taxpayers, through their elected representatives, will want some control how those funds are spent. That seems to me to be a fair compromise.

Teachers Will Be Professionals

Teachers need to be professionalized, whether they like it or not, with all the benefits and responsibilities that flow from that status. We need professionals to do the hard work of education because we need educators to be responsible for student outcomes. Teachers should be like treated like doctors, lawyers, accountants, and other professionals. Doctors don't have to cure every patient and lawyers don't have to win every dispute, but they are required to render their services competently. If they fail to do so they risk having their license revoked and having to compensate for their malpractice. The upside is that as professionals, teachers will be free to render their services (within the guidelines established by the profession) in the manner of their choosing and free from the silly micro-regulations in effect today because educators have failed to police themselves like other professions.

The main benefit for teachers for professionalizing is that teachers themselves get to decide how they will organize themselves to offer their services. Any professional teacher can put out a shingle and offer services as a sole practitioner. Or than can partner up with one or more lawyers and offer services as a partnership. They can enter into more complicated organizational structures as they grow, much like modern day law firms and doctor practices.

Of course, since educators haven't yet developed their own code of professional responsibility (especially one that people trust), they're going to need some objective criteria for determining when services have been rendered adequately. This can be accomplished by ...

All Educational Services Will be Rendered on a Contractual Basis

Students and their teacher would have a contract setting forth the manner in which educational services will be rendered and criteria against which learning will be measured. Students will have obligations and so would teachers. Ideally, the system might work like this:

The teachers would determine her entrance requirements and placement criteria. The teacher should be able to determine if the student has the skills,knowledge, and other factors needed to succeed in the class. The teacher would also determine the obligations of the students accepted for instruction, such attendance criteria, homework criteria, and the like. Teachers are in the best position to determine whether a student is capable of succeeding with the instructional methods that will be employed and the teacher's assessment of her own skills. This is only fair since the teacher will be on the hook for educating the students she accepts. Bear in mind that the more stringent the teacher's requirements, the more difficult it will be for the teacher to attract students, so this process should find an efficient equilibrium point that satisfies both teachers and students.

teachers will also be required to spell out everything that will take place in the classroom and exactly what skills and knowledge will be taught and learned by the students -- what will be taught, how it will be taught, what curriculum will be used, how will the curriculum be supplemented, and the like. The student and her parents should be able to determine in advance exactly what will be taking place in the classroom and what will be learned.

Most importantly, the education contract will specify the class's exit criteria and whether it has been met by the student. The exit criteria should include the content specified by the State which will likely be a minimal skills test to assure the public that it has gotten the expected value from its investment. The exit criteria should also include any additional content, if any, that the teacher has promised to teach in the education contract.

Also, spelled out in the education contract should be the downstream teachers/programs that accept this teacher's final exam as fulfilling their entrance requirements. For example, the final arithmetic teacher would specify in her education contract which algebra teachers accept a passing grade in her class as fulfilling their algebra class prerequisites. This will encourage teachers to work together to develop their own standards that will carry students from the beginning of their formal education to the end, whether it be college or work.

As professionals, teachers would be responsible for assuring that all the students they accept learn everything they've promised to teach and pass the final exam. Otherwise, the teacher will be given a brief period (say two weeks) to cure the student's deficiencies through remediation. Failing to cure the student's deficiencies will result in the teaching forfeiting some or all of the funding she received to educate the student which will go to remediating the student.

Education Colleges Will No Longer Have a Monopoly on Teacher Preparation

Any person with an undergraduate degree should be able to teach if she is capable of passing the state's licensing exam and background check. This would include degrees from college's of education.

College's of education mostly teach pedagogy. But pedagogy should be determined by practicing teachers. Some teachers may find value in the pedagogy taught in Ed colleges in which case they should be free to hire Ed school graduates. Other teachers may feel that content knowledge is more valuable and that pedagogy is best taught by them according to their own philosophy in which case they should be free to hire graduates of their choosing.

Classrooms should be allocated to teachers who've attracted sufficient students in the district the school Building serves

Since the community owns the school buildings and the equipment therein, these resources should be offered to any teacher who has attracted sufficient students from the district to consume the eduction services they're offering.

Any licensed teacher (or group of teachers) should be able to offer educational services to students in any school district. For example, before every semester there might be an educational services "fair" in which all teachers interested in offering educational services in a particular school district advertise their offerings and attempt to attract students. Each classroom should be rated as to the minimum and maximum students it can hold. Once a teacher has attracted the minimum number of students in the district that teacher would be entitled to lease a classroom in that district for that semester. That teacher determines the maximum number of students she believes she can educate. The number of students successfully educated per semester determines the compensation that teacher receives. This provides an incentive for teachers to maximize the efficiency of the services they provide.

If students don't like the educational services offered in their home district, they are free to go to any other school district that has room. In this way, classroom space will be efficiently allocated. This also permits niche educational offerings to pull students from different districts.

I'm going to stop here for this post and let you chew this over. I haven't included everything that a well run public school system should have, such as funding allocation, but I think you have enough to see how my proposed system better aligns the incentives needed to improve education.

No doubt I've failed to include much and have failed to account for various factors. That's what the comments are for to point out my mistakes and help to improve on this basic framework. Or to argue that certain parts should simply be thrown out.

Do your worst.

I'll attempt to draft a post that includes the rest of the framework while responding to your critiques.