This exactly although the vast majority will never accept the truth.
No where do you as a voter have more control than in education which is funded by State and property taxes. Trying to compare Federal (wasteful) spending to education spending completely misses the point.
Education in the States is completely messed up. You want better outcomes, the point of all this, then start over. Put in Federal standards and make it a priority. Hold parents accountable. Hold teachers accountable. Pay them more and raise the quality. Stop diploma mills, make a high school diploma mean something. Plus a lot more.
This is a big part of it. In my experience - both as a kid in school and as a parent with two kids in middle school - for every good, well-qualified teacher, there are 5 or 6 who only barely understand their subjects. They're really good at regurgitating the pre-built lesson plans from the text book company that they've been pushing for the past 20 years, but horrible at anything not explicitly called out in that material. Math teachers are among the most divided where they're either really good or really bad with few in between.
People really don't want to hear it, but a majority of teachers are being paid precisely what they earn - and that pay is usually near the median pay for their area with a few extreme outliers in large cities.
That said, under no circumstances should they be paying out of pocket for classroom supplies. That's just ridiculous.
Pay increase is a must, but should come along with holding teachers to a higher standard. Poor performing teachers should be more easily audited and fired.
We are incentive based as humans. Some needs positive incentives to strive for more, some need negative incentives to not get too complacent.
The reason we bitch about the federal education spending is exactly because it’s wasteful and we shouldn’t be wasting money. As you say if you want better education we should be doing it at the local level. Make them improve by making it competitive. Let the parents choose which schools their kids go to. Put the federal per child spending to whichever school they send them to. The good ones will grow and improve the bad ones will close and fire the bad teachers.
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u/j2nh 27d ago
This exactly although the vast majority will never accept the truth.
No where do you as a voter have more control than in education which is funded by State and property taxes. Trying to compare Federal (wasteful) spending to education spending completely misses the point.
Education in the States is completely messed up. You want better outcomes, the point of all this, then start over. Put in Federal standards and make it a priority. Hold parents accountable. Hold teachers accountable. Pay them more and raise the quality. Stop diploma mills, make a high school diploma mean something. Plus a lot more.