Education Reform - Realign focus on our children's success

Education
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Education, from primary to collegiate, needs to be assessed, reformed and reduced in costs.

Currently our educational system is fragmented/broken and far too costly due to inefficient processes and too many groups involved.

  1. Department of Education: needs to be assessed for their effectiveness and productivity.
    Currently it seems there is far to too much bureaucracy involved in our educational system, with what appears to be little focus on our children’s and young adults’ success.

  2. Common Core Curriculum: needs to be assessed for actual success. Metrics must be gathered on this teaching approach to ensure our children are actually growing and succeeding.

  • US spends the most on our primary/secondary schooling per child, yet our successful graduation rates and testing levels lag other countries.
  • Many children are not able to read or perform math at appropriate grade levels.
  • US needs to ensure our children will be competitive with other countries, enabling them to have successful opportunities. We need to stop off-shoring our jobs to those countries that have stronger STEM educational knowledge.
  1. Educator Tenure: Investigate mandated (union) salary increases that are not aligned with actual educator/teacher performance.
  • Investigate tenure as a whole, as this widely accepted approach for teachers can lead to lacking performance behaviors. This is the only industry that protects worker in such a fashion. Private industry evaluates employees with performance reviews and conducts remedial performance and salary plans accordingly.
  1. Collegiate Education: needs to be assessed and REDUCE costs for this level of education.
  • Determine who is profiting from these high costs for further education.
  • Investigate Private College/University endowments vs student loan forgiveness
  • Investigate and determine the salaries for administration, educators, etc. for proper alignment to our job market needs to remain competitive with the world.
  • There just seems to be too many administrators to educator to student ratios. Too many “top” level jobs which seem to not productively contribute to the education and success rate of our young adults, and inflate the cost of this education.
  1. Vocational Schooling: needs to be assessed and prioritized as an appropriate education for many of our young adults
  • We need to stop “talking down” on these types of jobs, as we now lack these skills in our workforce.

Overall, Educational System needs to be reformed and improved for the success and future of our children. We need to stop failing them.

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Education should be free for all Americans or at least reduce the cost significantly. Our country must have an educated population.

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Yes! Get rid of tenure completely! I understand why it was originally put in place, to protect professors from losing their job for expressing differing and unpopular ideas. However, it has now morphed into an abused system that is impeding the success of all of our schools.

Speaking from experience, I have been a teacher for eight years. We as teachers are at our best when we are observed. It gets us to collaborate, reflect, and revise our lessons, curriculum and student works.

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As we consider what is to be done with the Department of Education, I am leery of turning control over to the states. In this era of technology/capabilities, we have brilliant minds that can design a structure to elevate young minds. We have many Asians in our country who excel in math skills. Sal Khan of Khan Academy would be an excellent resource for ideas. I would love to see a task force gather around a table and share their ideas for helping Americans start to excel in the arena of education! I am sure they are full of ideas. We don’t have to have a teacher in every classroom in America but the right teachers in place via video broadcast to make learning FUN and productive! We can do better.

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I’m not sure free is what is required for our higher education system, but I do agree, we need our future generations educated and competitive - in fields that are needed (and top priority). We tend to have too many educated in oversaturated fields, which results in difficultly finding employment.

We need to be balancing our educational systems with job market needs. Hence the reason why we are seeing the “trades” jobs on the rise recently. Many of these jobs have gone unfulfilled over the last decade….mainly because these types of jobs have been “talked down”, and a college education was necessary.

Balance is needed.