Three Things to Transform Schools
Everyone and their neighbor has an opinion about the school system. It’s been this way for more than 50 years. And every time I hear a new opinion, I just roll my eyes. Have any of these people actually worked in a school?
If they have, they must have been sleeping on the job, because none of the suggestions apply to schools. Their ideas are not bad, but they don’t address the real problems schools face.
New York City is now proposing hybrid learning for students and their “brilliant” idea is to provide each student with two Teachers. Yes, Two! One for the regular classroom curriculum and then another for the online curriculum.
I applaud New York City for trying to think “out of the box”, but peaking your head out of the box is not really innovative.
So, here are the three things schools need to do. First, they need to redesign the entire curriculum. We are not teaching kids the right things. We have created a one size fits all curriculum that serves none of the kids needs.
Second, we need to re-train Teachers. The problem for the last 50 years has never been Teachers. All of the blame placed at the Teachers feet is misguided. We have the best and brightest Teachers in the world, but they do not have the best training in the world.
Third, we need to give back to our schools. It would be really helpful if people were more aware of where their tax dollars were being spent. Don’t get angry at local Boards of Education, but one of the biggest wastes of your tax dollars is health insurance premiums. Can you believe that?
The single biggest benefit we can give American Schools is Universal Health insurance. It will save taxpayers billions of dollars. And we can start using that money for training for Teachers.
