I'm not an expert in education, economics, or finance, but I'm just finishing my 18th year of school, and I spent a lot of that time learning about money. That should at least qualify me to shoot my mouth (fingers) off on a blog nobody reads.
I've been all over the educational spectrum: 4 different grade schools, a sixth grade center, middle school, high school, a joke college (no offense to my DSC peeps), a good religious University for a bit, and now graduate school at a respected State University. I've done well enough to not be bitter, but not well enough to be an arrogant academic. I've seen a wide range of problems, from misallocation of funds to underqualified staff, but there is one problem that every school I've attended shares: Inability to adapt to individual student needs.
I can't tell you how many times I've heard my professors say, "I suck at math, that's why I went to law school." These are smart cookies; they went to superstar univiersities. Also, I'm not talking about Calculus here, most of the time it's like this: "So we can see that the jury found the defendant to be 70% at fault. The total damages were $800,000 so lets see... what's that, oh no I don't have a calculator and I suck at math. I went to law school to sue the ba___ards, not do accounting." Really? You suck at math? False.
What's 800 divided by 10? 80. (10%)
What's 80 times 7? 560. (10% seven times is 70%)
So 70% of 800,000 is 560,000.
"Well what if it's 73% smarty pants?" Well you know how to get 70%.
So what's 1% of 800? 8.
8 x 3 is 24.
560 + 24 is 584.
73% of 800,000 is 584,000.
Well nobody taught me that--ever. One day I just realized that it was easier to do in my head if I broke it down. Blame it on whatever you want. Maybe it's technology's fault; I'm sure my power ranger's-calculator watch is to blame.
Anyway, that's just a silly example. I'm sure you can think of an example in your life when something was really hard to learn one way, and then really easy to learn another way.
Maybe you learn by watching, or listening, or doing, or watching and doing, or watching and listening, or doing and listening, or a combination of all three. So what is a 3rd grade teacher supposed to do? Make all the kids listen, watch, and do? Well then what about the kids who only learn through repetition, and the kids who only learn through variety. And there are the kids who learn fastest by reading the textbook, and the kids who need a question and answer session.
That seems like a problem to me. At least 24 different learning style/method combinations, in classrooms with 18-30 kids. With children being placed in schools by geography rather than learning style or ability. Some people say choice in education would fix this problem but I'm not entirely convinced. I got to choose my law school, but "learning style" was not an available criteria for consideration.
The simplest solution, and probably the best, is for parents to get more involved with the education of their children. I'm sure the school districts could afford to train a couple awesome teachers to learn to diagnose learning styles to help the parents out.
We could also offer additional free online classes tailored to individual learning styles. Take two hours out of the school day, where teachers broadcast live classes in different styles, and students from all over the state can participate. Not enough computers? Well different classes could go at different times during the week or day.
It just drives me crazy to see that the educational system is supposedly getting worse. My kids need a good education, and I shouldn't have to pay for private school to provide it. I've also crunched the numbers, and I'm convinced that money is not the problem (but that's a different topic for a different day)
Well I'm just thinking out loud... but feel free to give me your point of view.
