Best Practices

This entry is the final in the series exploring solutions to the education crisis.

Politicians throw around the term "best practice" quite a bit. The idea is to find a program that works and adopt it as policy. It is really a business term, and refers to companies altering their methods--based on what their competitors or other businesses are doing--in order to increase efficiency.

For the federal government, this usually means taking a state or local program and making it a national program.

This is a disastrous concept to apply to education. While common sense ideas like raising teacher wages and constructing and rehabbing schools to meet modern standards should be applied across the board, specific education policies must be determined by states and districts.

The reason for this is very simple. Demographics have a huge impact on how children learn, and a California senator knows little about how a child in Detroit needs to be educated, while a Michigan congressman would struggle to understand the complexities of the immigrant culture in Los Angeles. "Best practices" are very different in Los Angeles and Detroit. Furthermore, localizing school policy would empower parents and teachers within districts, giving them a louder voice and an incentive to be more involved.

Is bilingual education a good idea? What about gender segregation? Should phonics be part of every grade school curriculum? The answer to all three of these questions is another question: What will work best for your district? If states really got smart, they could even design part of their education plans around their economies, supplying better employees for businesses and giving students a better chance at getting and holding jobs.

The federal government would be wise to spend their education budget in the following ways:

1) Increase teacher salary. Make the starting salary about 50% higher than it currently is (to about $45,000), and continue driving it up at a rate that outpaces inflation.

2) Build and maintain higher quality education facilities. Technology, buildings, books and supplies--all of these are essential to education.

3) Give states money for the express purpose of conducting concise, meaningful research in order to discover what the "best practices" are for their districts. It is time for some serious research to be conducted by the brightest minds in the field.

4) Cut nearly every other program included the federal education budget. Give the money to states, put the issue in their hands, and allow voters to impact education locally, where they can see the fruits of their labor.

Following these four guidelines--along with holding parents accountable for their children--will bring about better teachers, better schools, and better curriculum. And a tax increase would not be necessary to fund these simple programs.

Now, all that said, there is one subject that I firmly believe must be taught in every school: money. Simple classes, starting in grade school, that cover topics such as balance sheets, saving and investing, the impact of debt, the rewards of compound interest (and its dangers in credit cards), and retirement plans--all of this would help Americans out of bad debt and give each citizen the necessary knowledge to make decent financial decisions.

I am not so naive as to say that these classes will turn Americans into financial geniuses, but with a basic education on how money works our citizens would become more responsible for their finances and could be justifiably held accountable for their finances. As it stands now, the poor get poorer as they ring up debt and throw money away on rent while the wealthy get richer by purchasing more apartment complexes.

All of these ideas about improving education come back to the same principle of giving every citizen a chance to achieve success. Without a proper education, this will never be possible.