Obscene Amounts of Money
File this under Politics for obvious reasons:
One of my favorite blogs of late has been ReformK12.com which has a surpisingly good piece on the cost of public education in the United States. According to public numbers, on average we spend over $10,000 per student/per year in K-12 education while public schools do the same thing for almost a third of the cost. Being a parent of public and private school children, I'll let you guess which one is getting the better education.
Now I know that a bunch of that overhead has to go into buildings, lights, management, clubs; stuff that private schools might not have to deal with. But I doubt that this amounts to $6,000 per pupil in expenses, especially when most kids don't participate in after-school activities.
I pay almost $3,000 a year for my daughter to attend a small private school run out of a former teachers house. Two years ago Emily went there and in one year went from C's and D's to being on the Honor Roll. She is now at grade level, even after a year of junior high, and is excelling accoridng to her teachers. Hannah is doing science and math well ahead of her grade level and will be even further ahead after this year with Mrs. Rupely.
One of the things I'm learning in my privately paid for college class is that true leaders realize where problems lie and propose bold inititives to make change where needed. Our current public school system sucks. It's a bloated money-sucking machine which siphons funds to create jobs that amount to shuffling paper. I think it's time the Conservatives of this country finally stand up and say "enough of this crap". Take the department of Education, and institute a five year plan to reorganize it. All funding from the DoEd will stop effective with FY09. The states will be required to totally fund their own systems by 2009, with funds coming from existing state taxes to pay tuition for those that can't afford it (which will be few). This will lower the tax burden on everyone, but still allow for kids to get a quality education. Of course, I've got a bunch of bugs in this plan, but I know that staying with the status quo isn't going to make things better.
Hoenstly, I think we need to get back to the way things were done back fifty years ago before the state and federal government dictated what happened in school. We're talking about a major paradigm shift that won't happen from the inside out. It's going to take taxpayers and parents to push this through.
What do you guys think?