Education Revolution

Ruy Teixeira has argued that the Democrats need to embrace some new policy proposals in order to capture the "party of change" mantle. He suggests that education policy is a good place to start, since NCLB has been such a dud. Unfortunately, the D's are mainly focused on just increasing funding, which feeds stereotypes about Democrats and is of questionable utility (since the U.S. already spends more per child than most countries).

One of the frustrating things for legislators about the education issue is that everyone thinks they're an expert, since they went to school. But I do have some real experience with education, and I'm here to tell you that however bad you think it is, it's actually worse. I have just recently thrown up my hands at teaching college because of the profound inability of college freshman to learn. Whether it's unwillingness or the lack of skills, my students have gotten less competent every year. And these are college students. I can't imagine what the non-college bound are like.

So here is my general proposal for a Democratic education policy. First, abolish the summer vacation. Kids forget half of what they learned the previous year because they stop thinking for 3 months. The U.S. also has substantially fewer days in the classroom. Instead, move to a trimester system with two weeks between each period and a week break in the middle.

Second, extend the school day. The latch-key kid syndrome exists because we as a country refuse to admit that all parents work. When a child gets home at 3PM, there is nobody there. If we stretched the day to 5 or 6, we could supervise children and fit back in the arts, tutoring, and electives that we have squeezed out lately.

Third, start school at the age of 4. We've all been talking about universal pre-school. Let's just do it.

Fourth, strengthen accreditation standards. I don't think the "ouptuts" model of evaluating teachers is helpful, since teachers can't choose their students. But I do think we can make sure that educators know something about the subjects they teach. We should abolish "education majors." Instead, teachers should get a degree in the subject they are planning to teach.

Fifth, we need to put teachers in charge of their classrooms. Right now there are major discipline problems because teachers have to go begging to parents or school bureaucrats. Forget that: let's treat them like the professionals they are and let them impose order.

Sixth is curriculum. In Europe, they learn in middle school what we do in high school, and they learn in high school what we do in college. So we should just push substance back four years. Do we really think that Americans are just dumber than other kids? I'm convinced that a lot of the problem is that we just don't expect kids to be able to learn anything. So we shouldn't be surprised that we don't.

Now there are a lot of objections to this set of proposals, the most important of which is that it would cost too much money. Well, all I am suggesting is imitating what other countries do. Why is it that they get so much more bang for their buck? If we can't educate a child year round on 10,000 a student, something is very very wrong. But even if it did take more resources, it should come from the federal government. Education policy is a paradigm case of New Federalism: where the federal government provides resources and general direction to the states in areas of policy, while the states and localities work out the details.

Would this stuff be hard? Absolutely. Would if work? Probably. Would it send a message that Democrats are serious about fixing our educational system? Definitely.