Now we would have families partially dependent on little Johny and Little Jane's income screeching about unfair grading practices and agitating against hard teachers. These people elect the school board too.
Also yanking more than half the budget destroys everything and nobody gets paid anyway.
In other news part of the cost is to acquire qualified teachers who must be paid more than teachers in Nebraska because they have to be able to live in NYC.
Do you really think most of the budget goes in the bin?
Yes, I'm pretty confident most of the budget is wasted. In the past 50 years inflation adjusted spending per student is up 3x and assessment tests are flat. Other countries educate students better at a lower cost. It's fundamentally not that hard or expensive to educate children - you need a teacher, classroom, simple supplies, and a tiny bit of administration - not much else.
As for people screeching about unfair grading - yes. People screech about that now. We should make standardized tests and base the payments largely off that. Let parents get mad at schools and teachers that fail to prepare their children, that would be good.
Anyone who says insert complicated thing is very easy has abandoned any pretence of reason. Educating other people is in fact actually very hard.
Other countries eat much of the cost of health care and education. We have to pay people enough to cover both. There is also a complicated apparatus to deal with to meet federal obligations and get federal dollars that doesn't magically go away if you get test scores up.
You have started with a very large number entirely made up with no intent to justify it. There is virtually nothing to disagree with because you haven't bothered to justify it not even so far as to add up the costs of incentives and see if the cuts you propose equal the incentives you propose.
No, I said education was fundamentally not that hard and explained what I meant. You can't just declare that opinion "abandoning reason". We have been doing it, at cheaper cost, for decades as do other countries around the world. This is only an insurmountable problem because people profit off our current system and ideologues prefer siphoning state money to friendly political groups over educating students efficiently or well.
As for doing some math - of course not. I'm not in a position to make any of those changes and they would be politically impossible any way. The system will continue to fail as it has been and there's no point worrying about that. Instead of figuring out the details of proposals that will never be considered I'll just focus on making sure my kids can go to private schools.
No you wouldn't. You don't have to eliminate cheating, just keep it acceptably low.
Also, I never said the point was to maximize standardized test scores. That would be the student's incentive but not the teachers. Teachers would try to teach the curriculum and students would try to learn it so they could do well on the tests. Teachers need not receive any more pay for test scores.
As for the point - if you're abandoning measuring progress, let's just not educate kids and save ourselves a ton of money.
> You don't have to eliminate cheating, just keep it acceptably low.
Of course. I just don’t think it would be feasible to keep it acceptably low. Just look at what’s happening in countries like India. The have state wide internet shutdowns in some areas during the exam day amongst other draconian measures..
> That would be the student's incentive but not the teachers
They would align over time due to student/parent pressure to focus entirely on tests (and teachers wouldn’t have any incentive not to do that).
> As for the point - if you're abandoning measuring progress, let's just not educate kids and save ourselves a ton of money.
Tests work fine when they are used an an indicator. Prioritizing the maximization of test scores over everything else is already an issue, your suggestion would just make it much worse.
Also I entirely disagree with the whole premise of this statement. e.g. Finland for instance doesn’t have any standardized tests besides the one you take in your last year before graduating high school.
And yet.. Finland’s educational system is widely considered to be one of the best in the world.
Also yanking more than half the budget destroys everything and nobody gets paid anyway.
In other news part of the cost is to acquire qualified teachers who must be paid more than teachers in Nebraska because they have to be able to live in NYC.
Do you really think most of the budget goes in the bin?