I think we can all agree that our school system is terrible. It's inefficient, expensive, mismanaged, and consistently underperforming when compared with other first-world countries.

So what can we do about it?

A few questions you might want to address:

-Are vouchers the answer? Will the free-market work here?

-What kind of curriculum should the government be requiring? Do we ask too much of our students or too little?

-What kind of metric should be applied to teachers and schools? How do we empirically test the success of educational programs and educators? Most people agree that standardized testing isn't the way to go, but how else could you do it?

-What should happen to a school which fails? Close it down and open a new one? Pour money into the old one in an attempt to fix it?

-How do we adjust for the range of students' needs and the socioeconomic disparities that affect them?

Oog, I'm quite tired, but I can say a few things.

First, the school system is always "in trouble". We manage to churn out thousands of thousands of educated children every year nevertheless. Yes, there are failures but both by and large our school system is good.

Vouchers are not and never will be the answer. The voucher movement is surprisingly durable given that it started as the racist answer to integration following Brown v Board. In short, taking money away from troubled schools is retarded, and that's the only thing vouchers can do. Education is not simply a service that you purchase for your child, it is a public good, like police and fire protection and should not be treated as a profit-driven industry. If you're wealthy enough to afford security and fire protection beyond the norm, then hooray, you can also afford a private school. If not, and you can almost afford a private school then you can certainly afford to live in a high-tax school district.

The answer is quite simple, but unpopular. Smaller schools. Studies have shown and will continue to show non-stop that in a large school:
a) The students feel little or no connection with the student body
b) Students have little or no participation in extracurricular activities
c) Grades suffer
d) Discipline suffers horribly

In any student body where the majority of the students are unknown as a matter of course to any individual teacher, the school will suffer. The largest size for a school in which every student can be known by name is roughly three or four hundred. This is the size schools should be reduced to with classes of ~20 students.

This is unpopular because of a standard of false economy that feels it can make schools "cost effective", "streamlined", or "more efficient". The fact is that the returns from public education are felt ten or twenty years after the student graduates, when he has matured. Larger schools do not give any of the benefits proponents claim, or if they do so, do so only in reduced form.
a) They do not save time or money; a large school wastes a large fraction of overhead in dealing with disciplinary problems that a small school does not have.
b) They do not offer expanded curricula; students will always need the basics and few, if any, of the students will be able to take advantage of one or two extra courses a large school may offer (see discipline).


If people stopped trying to save money and started reducing school size (not just classroom size), then students would feel a much greater sense of community and well being that, even with the barest essentials in the classroom, would guarantee a positive scholastic experience and a greatly enhanced learning environment.

I disagree with the argument that our educational system is expensive, compared with other first-world countries. See the Economist Pocket World in Figures for comparative rates of education spending across countries. The United States is in the bottom end of the middle among 'first-world' countries.

Knowing more than a few teachers, here's what I hear from them.

"No Child Left Behind" needs to end. Realistically, some kids are smarter than others (or dumber, depending on how you look at it). The way they avoid leaving them behind is to dumb down the classes until everyone can pass. It may make the kids feel better about themselves, but it's lowering the quality of the education that all the kids get. I know that holding the less accomplished children back or putting them in separate classes is a problem socially, but sacrificing the education of the of the entire class for a few individuals is not a solution.

First step: yes, kids should be able to flunk. That won't really help unless holding them back a grade helps. Which, in a truly messed up school, it won't. Truly messed up schools are not cursed with unusually stupid students. They are cursed with students who do not care, or consider the whole thing to be an elaborate waste of their time.

Second step: address the problem of schools that are cursed with students who consider the whole thing to be an elaborate waste of their time. I do not know how to do that.

As a beginning proposal for this, I would suggest ensuring that the whole thing is not an elaborate waste of their time. I was more prepared for college after middle school than I was after high school. No kidding.

I'm not saying you're kidding, but...

how does that even work?

I didn't learn anything new in high school, and I lost my study skills due to atrophy.

In a sense, it's my own fault, but the educators at my school should have noticed it, and drawn my attention to the option of taking the GED once I turned 16. I didn't know it was an option until I'd already been in college for two years.

I'd like to point out that, to a certain extent, small schools still have disciplinary problems. It just depends on how well/seriously the teachers treat the problem. It doesn't matter whether or not the teacher knows the students, if he think's it's just people messing around, the problem will not be addressed.

I'd say that a very large portion of the quality of education that you recieve depends on the teachers themselves. The sense of community and such all depends on the teachers/student council and how they actually go about involving the students in school activities. After having spent a few years in a small school (250ish students, total), I felt absolutely no sense of community towards the school and the vast portion of my classmates.

Holy crap, your high school must've been horrible! I can name a few classes through high school that I didn't learn anything in, but the entire four years? Wow. At least I picked up a few things, and when I got to 11th grade I actually started doing homework and studying; something I never did in any grade previous.

Regarding the original topic: I don't know that school size is the problem, but class size certainly is. There's nothing wrong with a 2000-student school if you've got at least 66 teachers to spread amongst them. Any less than 66 teachers and you're going to lose effectiveness in the classroom at a dramatic rate. It would be a significantly better school with 100 teachers.

Also, "No Child Left Behind" is the dumbest idea for education ever. I had a friend in school who was one year older than the rest of us because he was held back in 1st grade. That was the best thing that could've happened to him, because if he had been pushed forward all the way through school, he would've been a mess. As it was, he was just fine. Some kids grow a little slower, some grow a little faster, and we need to be able to support both of them. Ramrodding the slower ones does no good for anybody, and we need to lose this idea that being held back a year is the worst thing ever. Especially in the early years. Heck, I graduated from college two years later than I should have if I had followed the typical 4-years-to-graduate formula, and I'm fine. Really. The pink snorks tell me so.

True, but with a higher student/teacher ratio, it's harder for the faculty to create that sense of community. School activities are harder to keep under control or even organize with fewer teachers. This also brings up another big issue -- teacher salaries. Regardless of whether you think they're being paid enough (I don't think they are), you can't argue that income influences the decison to become a teacher and remain a teacher.

Agreed. The salary of teachers needs to increase drastically, maybe even up to the levels of doctors and whatnot. However, I'd say that actually having 'fun' activities is a big part of this 'sense of community' thing. There's just too many schools/teachers that try to fob off some pathetic activity as 'team building' and leave it at that. I'm not sure how'd you'd deal with this problem, but maybe a significant increase in teaching salary will attract more original thinkers into the teaching profession.

I'd say a problem with the education system as it is, is that it feels too much like an assembly line, with next to no attention being paid to individual students. There's no personalization of the experience to suit each student, and as such, everyone suffers to a certain extent.

The first thing the United States ought to do is stop funding schools with local property taxes. This is just outright dumb. It means that poor neighbourhoods have worse funded schools than rich neighbourhoods. And it also means that any parents who actually give a crap about their children's education, and who have any money to spare, will do everything in their power to move out of poor neighbourhoods with badly funded schools, which renders them even poorer. So then you end up with all the least motivated students concentrated in the worst funded schools.

Yes, schools suffer from lots of problems besides funding, but this particular problem just shoots the whole enterprise in the foot at the outset. If you wanted to design a dysfunctional school system on purpose, this is a pretty good way to do it.

It's less that my high school was horrible and more that it operated on a principle where people like me were entirely neglected because "we're going to pass anyway." We had a gifted program, but it wasn't much different from the bulk of the curriculum...Even there it felt like I didn't have to try.

My school wasn't too bad, it was just no good for me.

Does that make sense?

Can we define "gifted" first? By "gifted" do you mean the reasonably intelligent and diligent A- students, or the geniuses who compose their own classical music, play six instruments, write novels, and teach themselves quantum mechanics when everyone else is still doing Newton's Laws of Motion? My high school streamed English, Maths and foreign language classes for various difficulty levels, but didn't have a gifted program as such. They just dealt with the uber-genius kids by having them do more subjects than everyone else. I don't know whether they were bored out of their minds.