The Great Education Experiment

By Robert L. Mayo Posted in Archived — Comments (6) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Of the 50 largest public school systems in the country, 14 give their students less than a 50-50 chance of graduating in 4 years. Across the nation, 1/3 of all high school students don’t graduate on time.

Without functional schools, the next generation of Americans will not succeed and America will fail with them.

Our schools are crying out for reform, yet our public officials refuse to take action. The usual pattern is for special interest groups to claim any specific reform will hurt the children, when the truth is it will hurt them. School boards, unions and politicians protect their jobs while the children are forgotten.

We won’t have bold education reform until we prove what works in the real world …so let’s find out.

Detroit has by far the worst large school system in the country. Only 22% of it’s 9th graders graduate after 4 years. The next worst is Baltimore with a 38% graduation rate. If ever there were two school systems ripe for experimentation, these are it.

I propose using these two cities to conduct a grand experiment. One randomly chosen city would turn its school system over to the Heritage Foundation, a highly respected, conservative think tank, to run for 7 years. The city would continue to provide the current level of funding, but give Heritage absolute authority to implement cutting edge conservative educational reforms. The other city would turn its public schools over to the Brookings Institution, an equally respected liberal think tank, for similar experimentation with liberal reforms.

An obvious question is, why would these two cities agree to give up control over their schools? The altruistic answer is that they have proven themselves incompetent to educate their children. But if these schools are failing specifically because administrators and politicians care more about their own power than the education of our children, they will need additional motivation.

The irresistible incentive would be a 4 year college scholarship for every graduating senior in both cities. $20,000 per graduate would be sufficient to pay tuition and fees for a 50/50 mix of community college and lower cost state universities. Even if graduation rates skyrocket (which is the goal, after all), the total cost of the experiment would be under $1 billion. Congress thought it was a brilliant idea to spend $320 million to build a bridge in Alaska to an island of 50 people. With respect to our wise representatives, this would be a better way to spend our money.

The results of this grand experiment would be able to guide us in restoring our educational system for a generation. We wouldn’t have to argue and speculate about what to do. We would know.

That's certainly thinking by South Park Conservative

That's certainly thinking outside the box. I would think that the graduation rate would go up a little in the city run by the Brookings Institute and it would go up a lot in the city run by the Heritage Foundation, thanks to school choice completely revolutionizing the education system in that city.

I live less than 10 miles from Baltimore and would love to see their school system controlled by the Heritage Foundation. Of course there's no chance in hell that would ever happen. It would probably be much more practical to just try to convince every state in the U.S. to try school choice in one of their cities or in the whole state. We only have to succeed in 1 or 2 out of 50 to prove that it works.

Reply To This — User Info — #1

My Two Cents by dvdmsr

In my experience as an educator, a student's performance has less to do with who is running his classroom or school and more with who is running his home. Calculate the difference in the home life of a successful student versus a failing student and whatever plan that best addresses these deficits will win out over any other.

Most reformers, liberal or otherwise, simply look at statistics and think that if they can duplicate a few noteworthy variables that they have found to be correlated with success that they then can obtain similar results. For example, children in families who sit down together for dinner generally do better academically than those who don't. Simply encouraging families to mimic this behavior in hopes of obtaining better academic results is ridiculous. Correlation is not causation. Yet this is the premise of much of the so-called research based initiatives common in education. Typically these studies ignore the impact of other possibly significant variables, like in the above example, what exactly brought these families to the dinner table together. The type of cultural analysis that this would involve is frequently avoided either because they find these variables difficult to define or measure, or as I am more prone to believe because they find the value judgment inherent in singling out such cultural traits as good or bad as politically incorrect, insensitive, and/or contrary to their own liberal values.

Advancing the status of unborn human beings one or more persons at a time.

Reply To This — User Info — #2

This is way too good an idea... by Vladimir

...to ever get serious consideration.

There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life. - Frank Zappa

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Signature test by Robert L. Mayo

This is a test of my new signature. It looks ok in preview, but if anything goes goofy in the html, I want it to happen on my own post.

Robert L. Mayo
If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.
- Thomas Paine

Reply To This — User Info — #6

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