The education system is broken and has been for decades. The supporters of the system re-characterize criticism of the system into "attacks" on teachers (ie. union membership) and demand more money.
The establishment "won" their side of the argument in many states -- states that richly compensated employees (the payscale in most NY school districts ends at $110k, plus 65% pension for life) and administrators (typical school superintendents make $175k in NY) and built lots of new schools. Yet those investments yielded marginal "value" at best.
Until recently, the critics were mostly focused on religion (ie. Catholic schooling dominated education in many areas until fairly recently), monetary issues (taxes) and ideological stuff (unions suck).
That seems to be changing now. Movements like the Khan Academy are bringing scientific methods focused on outcomes to education. There was a recent "Freakonomics" podcast talking about how the New York City school system is experimenting with multi-modal learning, which seems to be successful in its early stages.
$100K+ and $150K+ /w pension are the salaries it takes to attract and retain excellent teachers and school administrators respectively (adjust for locality). These are the going rates at all the top public schools in the nation. With a fully staffed school, it works out to be about $15K per student per year if you include overhead. The results you get are a 99% graduation rate, average standardized testings scores in the 90th percentile or above, special education, tons of AP classes, and top flight athletics and fine arts programs. Success in college admissions follows from the aforementioned facts, i.e. extraordinarily successful.
So I would propose to reframe the discussion. Because talking about money is silly. We know how much it costs to run a top tier school. The central question in my mind is whether we can develop new methods of education that are cheaper but achieve the same result.
Read my comment. I specifically didn't focus on money. The point is throwing money and bodies at the problems of education has a proven track record of NOT working.
Those results that you refer to apply to a suburban school in high-income area with few challenges. Those students have an edge because they have parents (note the plural) who can fill in the blanks left at school or have the resources to hire someone to do that. That's why the stoner white kids from the suburbs graduate from high school and the middle of the pack urban students get swept out the door.
I live in a small city with low costs (standard of living index is 1.1) where the per-pupil costs are in excess of $23,000/child, the average teacher salary is $85k, median income in the city is $50k, the graduation rate is 42%, and in many elementary schools less than 15% of the 4th graders are in the upper half of state testing results for math.
That NYC multi-modal experiment offers the promise of bridging the gap between urban students without access to supplemental instruction and the suburban kids who have lots of resources available. Kids spend time in large/small classroom settings, Khan-academy type computer applications and "virtual" tutoring. Results are measured and kids get rotated through various modes of learning based on their results.
What does that mean? It means that we can improve education and reduce the inequity in our society without throwing $100k+ teachers into the breach like infantrymen. Being born in a city shouldn't condemn you to a marginal education and future prospects.
It's not a matter of being "against" teachers or whatever -- it's applying their talents strategically in a way that benefits the students. Would you solve an IT or difficult programming problem by throwing more IT guys at it? Or would you break the problem down and figure out the best way to address it?
What you describe is a school in a low cost area with a 42% graduation rate that compensates its teachers just as well as the best high schools in America. Even with an average teacher salary of 85K, a cost of $23,000 per student seems high by a significant amount (an average of 85K for teachers usually comes in at under $20K student/year by a fair margin). Also towns with a median income in that range usually have far better graduation rates. I'd definitely be interested in learning more about that school, because those numbers seem far different than those I have experience with.
The establishment "won" their side of the argument in many states -- states that richly compensated employees (the payscale in most NY school districts ends at $110k, plus 65% pension for life) and administrators (typical school superintendents make $175k in NY) and built lots of new schools. Yet those investments yielded marginal "value" at best.
Until recently, the critics were mostly focused on religion (ie. Catholic schooling dominated education in many areas until fairly recently), monetary issues (taxes) and ideological stuff (unions suck).
That seems to be changing now. Movements like the Khan Academy are bringing scientific methods focused on outcomes to education. There was a recent "Freakonomics" podcast talking about how the New York City school system is experimenting with multi-modal learning, which seems to be successful in its early stages.