A Negotiation: a short-short story

Reinventions: K-12 Education

Here's a video of my six-point plan for reinventing K-12 education.

The six points, without the helpful explanation in the video, are listed below.

My six-point plan for reinventing K-12 education:

1. Naturally gifted teachers could get a teaching license merely by teaching a demo lesson before a master teacher---no boring teaching education program required. Other candidates would complete a teacher training program provided by a school district's master teachers, not by university professors who have never been master K-12 teachers.

2. Classes should be grouped by ability. Efforts should be made to ensure that racism is not a factor in selection, and that students are moved up and down as appropriate.

3. The fact-larded curriculum should be delarded, replaced with big projects--for example, developing a model city, building a rocket, creating an online student newspaper, etc.

4. The teacher's unions must be reined in. They've insisted that the best and worst teachers are paid the same--there's no better formula for ensuring that quality people don't enter the profession. In addition, they have forced school districts to, after just two or three years, give teachers tenure for life. To get rid of a teacher after getting tenure requires a long, expensive, painful undue process. Most principals decide it's just not worth the massive documentation and a dog fight with the union lawyers.

5. Use dream-team-taught courses, especially for difficult-to-teach courses such as algebra. These would be developed by a team of nation's best instructors under the U.S. Office of Education's auspices and distributed free on the Net to all school districts. A local teaching assistant would be in the actual classroom to provide the human touch. Using dream-team-taught classes would enable all students, rich and poor, to receive world-class instruction. Nothing would more improve the quality of education, but again, the unions would balk.

6. The school year should be lengthened. Currently it consists only of five hours a day for 175 days.

A Blueprint for Reinventing Education

I've just written an article, A Blueprint for Reinventing Education. It will appear as a cover story in the August issue of Mensa's national magazine. I thought you might enjoy an advance look: Click HERE.

There's still time for me to change it, so I welcome your comments.

Will Obama Finally Take On the Teacher's Unions?

This article in the New York Times reports that the U.S. spends more money per student than any country in the world yet its achievement is in the bottom 1/3 of developed nations.

Not all of the blame can be laid at the teacher's feet. Some of it, for example, is the result of America's insistence on putting students of all abilities in the same class and forcing ever more of them to read Shakespeare even if they're reading on the 5th grade level and to solve quadratic equations when they can't do simple arithmetic in their heads.

But certainly some blame must go to the teachers' unions who, because the Democrats so fear their political power, have managed to continue to get contracts which give teachers virtual lifetime job security after just two or three years--even if a teacher burns out and her/his students learn less than similar students in other classes. In another blow against quality teaching, teachers get paid exactly the same whether they're excellent or poor.

The article suggests that President Obama may be willing to try to convince Democrats to take a stand. If anyone has the ability to persuade, it's him. Let's hope he succeeds.