Andy Rotherham at Eduwonk is wondering, “what would you do with $5 billion to improve American education?”
Here are some of the ideas from the many comments:
- Find the best method for training teachers, and then require that the exact curriculum be implemented in every Ed School in the nation.
- I would establish a competitive master-teacher career track open to candidates with five or more years of documented exceptional impact on student achievement.
- Establish a equivalent of the medical residency “match” in the public schools. Each year, each aspiring, credentialed teacher would apply for school jobs through the same service. Schools would compete for top staff, and at the end of the selection process each teacher would receive a single school assignment where he/she would apprentice under master teachers for three years.
- Use the money to hire teachers for one-on-one home tutoring for our most disruptive students.
- I would take $3 billion and spend it buying out as many education vendors as I could, so I could streamline product development and reduce the amount of time districts and schools spend being bombarded by salespeople.
- Shift the focus from measuring test scores to measuring life outcomes, specifically: college going and persistence, entered employment, retention, and earnings gain over 1 year, and civic particpation. Provide support for developing the necessary tracking systems, provide huge incentives for districts to begin holding themselves to these broader goals, and reward those districts that make the biggest gains.
- I don’t think there’s any way to spend $5 billion nationally without it being a drop in the bucket. I’d pick a small to medium-size urban district and pour all the money into it...If spent wisely, at the end of the day we would know whether or not more money really can make a difference.
- Universal day care at no charge to parents.
- Pick middle schools in neighborhoods with the worst high school dropout rates and place counselors at those schools to specifically focus on students with low attendance.
- Have a program to create teacher’s assistants. Not teaching assistants, but Teacher’s Assistants, that is administrative professionals who can perform all that paperwork and documentation that teachers spend hours upon hours doing.
See the idea he picked as his favorite here.
What would you do?
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