WW Plus: School Reform Ideas - Part 1

This week’s Wealth Weekly Plus focuses on school reform. While there will be partisans on both sides on the school reform issue, there is less disagreement that we have a problem to solve. Personally, I support public magnet and public charter schools. We'll get to that some other time. But here’s where I think we can start:

Teacher Accountability and Performance
President Barack Obama spoke in broad terms when talking about teacher accountability. It was a smart move on his part because both sides of the school reform issue felt he was taking their side. However, I’d like to dive right in. Listening to both sides of the accountability issue I’ve heard teachers say that the measures of accountability are too narrow, leading them to “teach to the test” because the primary measurement of performance is standardized tests.

So let’s add in other measures and weight them. Standardized test do need to be a part of the weighted system because grading is not the same across the country. From the New York Times:

The nation has a patchwork of standards that vary widely from state to state and a system under which he said “fourth-grade readers in Mississippi are scoring nearly 70 points lower than students in Wyoming — and they’re getting the same grade.” In addition, Mr. Obama said, several states have standards so low that students could end up on par with the bottom 40 percent of students around the globe.

This does not stem from a lack of money, but a lack of discipline. Standardized testing can identify what teaching methods are ineffective, but it shouldn’t be the primary focus of the teacher. The student should know how to think through unfamiliar, unconventional problems by using the knowledge they learned in their basic secondary school coursework. If they are taught about circumference and circle properties and cylinders, they should be able to find the volume of an tire inner tube given the right parameters.

So how do we reward our teachers? I'll try to cover that in the next post on this topic.

Just a Thought: Chartered Success

My other passion other than personal financial empowerment is education reform. Here and Harlem, public charter schools and public magnet schools have a niche, although currently they have to share resources (buildings) with other public schools. Leaders are working to help charter schools move into their own buildings to prevent divisiveness in the student body. However, some areas, like the community of Watts in Los Angeles, have bigger struggles. The following is a clip from Reason.TV: (Facebookers, you'll have to click through to the main site)...




I think that public charter and magnet schools could help improve a community in innovative ways. When people move into a community, one of the biggest factors is the quality of schools. Parents will often look over a neighborhood if they don't like the caliber of schools offered. Often, lower-income communities have lower-quality schools that will have a very difficult time improving because of a reduced tax base. By introducing charter/magnet options into a community parents from a wider range of incomes will move into communities, adding to the tax base. This could theoretically funnel resources into all the schools in the neighborhood/zone and can encourage info-sharing between schools so that they can all improve.