President Swordsman Repairs the Educational System

I think most of us have realized that standardized testing doesn't work. The results of the No Child Left Behind Act are pathetic. I thought my education sucked when I was in high school in the 1980s, but it was excellent compared to today.

Please watch the following videos (and let me know if they disappear):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfRUMmTs0ZA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2U_KRpz5NY

61% of Americans believe the creation account of Genesis is literally true. As an agnostic who understands evolutionary theory, this is troubling. But not nearly as troubling as the fact that 60% of Americans cannot name five out of the Ten Commandments (popular version).

Think about that. A bunch of people out there believe in the Bible but have no idea what it states.

Random Lunatic: "I believe that the Bible is literally true!"
Nine the Swordsman: "Okay. What's in the Bible?"
Random Lunatic: "Checking....duhhhh...."

National Geographic found that 11% of all college age adults could not find their own country on a map. 69% could not find England. Less you think the morons in that second video were an unrepresentative sample.

20% of Americans believe the sun orbits the earth. 51% of all professional engineers in the US are foreign-born, as are 45% of all professional computer scientists (and with the closing of the borders and tighter immigration, we'll lose those people). 75% of respondents did not appear to comprehend to the slightest degree what science involves, or what scientists do, or how scientists confirm or disconfirm an hypothesis. 48% of Americans think dinosaurs lived at the same time as early humans.

Only 20% of American students could name ANY one of the five freedoms contained in our First Amendment. The most common answer was that one of the freedoms was the right to own a pet.

Yes, it is time to start praying to the deity of your choice.

We're also ignorant, as Stossel points out (although I disagree with his solutions - they deserve to be heard) 76% of Americans think their own school district is fine.

Our children, again as Stossel correctly points out, are not idiots. We match foreign students grade per grade until about grade 4, and then we start getting stupid.

Our overall ranking of industrialized, modern nations is 24 of 29. We beat Mexico, Turkey, Greece, Portugal, and Italy. Everyone else kicked our butt.

In another study of 41 countries, we tied Latvia. Latvia.

That hurts.

So what can we do?

Well, many of the solutions proposed by Stossel, who wants to promote vouchers and private schools, can be implemented in public schools. In fact, it is more likely that they would be, because public schools have more oversight than private schools, who, let's face it, are mainly in business either to make money or promote an agenda, whether political or religious. This would be an unmitigated disaster. Look at the people who want vouchers: corporations who would make money off the schools. And like health care, education is not a commodity to be bought and sold.

Now, I don't know about you, but I wants kids educated. Period. I want the best education for ALL children, and not subject education to the whims of the marketplace. Morons from rich families should not be able to get a better education than poor geniuses because of the luck of who they were born to.

1. The education system in most school districts is a disaster. They are staffed by zombies who exist solely to justify their own existence in a bureaucracy. We should put less money toward administration and more toward teachers and classroom facilities.

2. Sports? I don't have a problem with sports, but it has to be in perspective. When a school districts spends money on a domed stadium and the kids are in mobile homes that function as classrooms, something is terribly wrong.

3. Teach comparative religions. Yes, I, a childless agnostic, actually am proposing that. How can we expect our children to meet the demands of a global economy if they do not understand Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism? Hell, most of them don't understand Christianity. And let's be real, gang, a lot of Christian kids are raised in such a rigid, controlled environment, and some think Jews eat babies and drink blood. We need children to be able to understand and comprehend their own faiths and also that of others.

4. Teachers must have more knowledge of the subjects they teach. In Finland, which is ranked first in the world, they mandate that all teachers get a Masters Degree. I say we do that too. Too many teaching programs emphasize education and fail the teachers and later students by not grounding the prospective teacher in their actual subject matter.

5. Teachers need continuing education. We expect doctors, pilots, etc. to keep up in their fields. Why not teachers? A physics teacher who is 50 years old is not going to remember what he learned 30 years ago, if it is even relevant today anyway. One month every three years should be added to the teachers' work year, during whcih they would have to take a special, upgraded, and federally financed continuing education course in their chosen field.

6. We need to mandate that no classes be over 25 students. Again, Finland and many other countries have done this and are outperforming us left and right.

7. We need pre-kindergarten programs. A recent study showed that over the last 20 years, 70% of the children of college graduates attended pre-kindergartener programs but only 38% of the children of high school dropouts did so. We're creating an ignorant, uneducated underclass.

8. Barack Obama was correct. We need federally mandated, age-appropriate sex education. Period. I'm tired of living in a ignorant country of ignorant children that has a higher teen pregnancy rate and a higher STD rate than most of the rest of the planet. Again, we are failing our children because of our own hangups. And screw you, John McCain, for trying to make this into some kind of pedophilic implication.

9. We need to let parents choose the school district they send their kids to within each district. Every kid gets a per capita amount of funding, which travels to the school that he or she attends, and which the principal can use to improve education at that school.

10. We need more, and better teachers. In response to requiring teachers to get a graduate degree and take continuing education classes, they need to become true professionals. Which means we have to pay them as true professionals. The difference between what a first year lawyer at a Manhattan firm and what a first year teacher was paid on average in 1970 was $2,000.00 a year. Today it is $103,000. Even if you adjust for inflation, that's an outrage. Teacher salaries should be as much as doubled and allocated based on student performance against standards developed by the teachers themselves. Math and science teachers should be paid even more.

11. With regard to performance, the schools should be graded, not the teachers. When teachers know that they will be rewarded if their entire school makes substantial progress, they will have an incentive to build a better school.

12. Principals should be given new authority, in cooperation with the NEA, to eliminate bad teachers.

13. All these proposals unfortunately require federal mandates and federal funding. No school district would be able to deal with these kinds of radical changes on their own. And in the global marketplace, it makes no sense at all that we still rely on local school boards to make decisions about curriculum. As seen in Kansas, some of these people are completely ignorant, and try to govern against the will of the parents, much less the teachers and administrators. Like it or not, we live in an interconnected world, and rigid local control is not going to work. You know darn well that there are school districts out there that would happily teach the Bible as a required course, along with Intelligent Design and would eliminate all sex ed from the curriculum, as well as all geography, resulting in more and more videos like the two I linked to.

14. College is too expensive. When people graduate from college today, they are shackled with debt that many cannot pay off until their 30s. This is not true of other countries, which offer free college education. In an economy which demands college educations for nearly every job, this is not unreasonable. I'm not certain of where to draw the line here, but we need to fund at least the top 35% in each class so they can go to college (and not just through scholarships and only if they cannot afford it themselves). Education should be for the masses, not just the classes. This student loan program is just a way to crush and demoralize people when they are at the most financially vulnerable in their lives.Is this expensive? Yeah. About $100 billion worth. I say we pay for part of it by shifting Title I Education to higher salaries for teachers and principals and save $5 billion right there. That means $95 billion.

And I say: so what? Either we do this or we get left behind sometime in this century with a third rate citizenry and a second rate economy.