American Manifesto Part Five: Education Section Two

 American Manifesto Part Five: Education Section Two

Globalism

As technologies expand the limitations of our physical location will be functionally reduced.  Students and teachers in Nebraska will be able to discuss common subject matters with their counterparts in Florida or California.  The concept of globalism fosters our consciousness of our interconnectedness and interdependence on both planetary and national scopes.

America could connect to classrooms in foreign countries.  We could utilize pre-recorded messages to broadcast over the web to overcome time-zone issues.  Other teachers could act as guest instructors via video.  The possibilities are only limited by the collective creativity of educators evolving digital education.

America has a serious problem with intellectual isolationism.  Kids and adults in this country may never go overseas except for a cruise or short vacation.  The reality of integrating other countries daily world into our own is a valuable asset to our consciousness as global citizens.  We could facilitate partnered education programs.  Students can conceive a tangible frame of reference when we talk about world politics, environmental issues, and international trade.

How much do the wars in Asia affect American kids?  Would we go to war with countries as much if our children spoke to their children throughout childhood?  Would they want to go to war with us? 

What about when a kid goes shopping at Wal-Mart or Best Buy and understands a deeper connection with production chains.  How would we see third-world labor?  Ignoring these interrelationships and the negative externalities of these decisions has led to economic, political and environmental problems. 

Pod-casted and satellite-broadcasted news streams similar to BBC America-type news casts could be done in coordination with organizations like National Public Radio to reach America’s students without much added cost.  The Department of Education could link in with agencies to develop you-tube-like daily news reports to present unbiased globally-focused fifteen-minute news casts for all students over laptops or tablets based on recent events.  The news could be followed up with general questions about our world responded to through the iPad-type tablets.  Polls could be displayed on how the entire school responded.

This also could be used in social studies courses.  It also may be more efficient to facilitate general knowledge as a subtext for students to witness the world.  We do not have to grade or test or evaluate.  We can present information that is highly pertinent, educational and forms the foundation of a critical thinker. 

"Education helps one cease being intimidated by strange situations."

Maya Angelou 

This backdrop can help extract the inner-city or small-town kid from a myopic focus of his own surroundings and use advances in technology and collective action to create a window into macro-level thinking.  Connecting equals survival. 

This type of broadcast could be prepared for elementary school-age children in an adapted format, to see other cultures without the realism of our economic and political angles, but more on human-interest levels of what kids can relate.

The key is coordinating educators with experts in the technology to facilitate the process and industry experts to provide practical applications that educators are too often insolated from by the nature of their profession.  This myriad of input will lead to constructive doers.  Content like this already exists, but coordinating the presentation with the curriculum will benefit the economy of scale and the value of the taxpayer expense.

Funding

Education has always been a state’s responsibility based on the constitution, yet the restraints and contingent funding from federal levels have created a hybrid system in design and implementation.  A teacher once told me, “The Fed gets in through the peanut butter,” meaning if a school wants the USDA food program; the school has to abide to a checklist of other non-cafeteria standards.

The inherent truths of subject matter whether it be phonics, multiplication; American history, proper grammar, or algebra can be designed and instructed under a common beneficial structure that allows for the reduction of overall costs through the sharing of fixed instructional costs and the fluidity of in-classroom and in-school selection of lessons. 

Under a hybrid-technological educational system, for older grades one excellent instructor or software program could lead a digital lesson over the internet to hundreds of classrooms in multiple school systems across multiple states on either a live, pre-recorded, or pre-designed basis.  Depending on the grade level of the students a physical teacher may or may not even need to be present during that day’s instruction or a lower-level aid or non-tenured teacher may be a monitoring or facilitator function.  This reduces overall costs.  Alternatively, we could decide to still fund the same number of teachers, but empower them with these digital assets.  We will see a shift in roles for the in-classroom instructor.  The cost savings of that teacher’s new role could be shifted to other educational assets to focus on the total learning environment.

Side rant on the university level

Extrapolating this concept to state universities, why are taxpayers concerned that a building with admissions tuition be charged for students to gain access to knowledge providers?  Why can’t a lectured course be entirely on digital-videos and exams be in controlled testing centers to reward college credit?  Why the building, why the cost, why the bureaucracy, why the $30,000 college debt?  Why not sell our educational assets as a global product?  If we re-focused away from profit primarily created for the government through student loans we could concentrate on proliferating education to the populace via digital paradigms rather than bottle-necking the information behind a financing contract with Sallie Mae or Bank of America inside the constraint of a physical lecture hall.

Put entire federally designed digital video courses in every major college subject free to U.S. citizens over the web and put the textbook in a fee-based digital Ap?  Replay filmed lectures to cameras.  Charge a moderate amount to take exams at testing centers with secure ID’s including biometric finger prints.  Let knowledge explode.  Gasp!  If knowledge is in a brain, what does it matter how it got there?  We can fish for knowledge with web-based self-piloted courses without added per-user costs?  (Look at what Yale is doing now.)

No single university, no state, just economical efficient knowledge and whoever learns, learns, passes and moves on.  Supplement with classes I want with another type of instruction such as live.  I’ll pay for those.  Don’t make me pay for education I don’t want and don’t need.  Correlate what I pay, with my cost to you and explode the atom bomb on the cost of higher education in America. 

Anarchy, how can we profiteer off of that?  Where will all the non-pragmatic intellectuals go if we don’t need lecture halls?  I can’t make my mortgage payment, because of this student loan payment. 

End of Side Rant, Back to Regular Rant

In classes that use buildings, we could have a scheduling system with an in-class more-experienced instructor maybe on Tuesday’s and Thursdays and with another set of student’s on Monday’s (other days, etc.)  Depending on the class premium in-class instructors may only be needed for one day a week. The teacher can reinforce the video lessons based on their knowledge of the issues, answer questions and formulate interactive lessons or example problems to encourage discussion amongst the students and provide lessons that a digital professor can not accomplish with the same proficiency.  This won’t work everywhere, but in some places it will.  We can also have self-directed lab learning days.

Use this model to train younger teachers.  Partner educators.  Think talent-sharing before cost saving.  Local educators must guide the balance of budget expense and experience.

Digital video lessons and software can be perfected for a national audience by educators using dynamic visual and auditory tools that a local educator would have limited access in time and resources to create.  Students could see other student’s learning the same material.  Research could be gathered on the commonly asked questions and trouble spots of that day’s lessons in each subject and be evaluated and re-evaluated for best practices to assist America’s youth. 

This paradigm shift in instructional methodology could be expanded into vocational-technical training, “alternative” post secondary education and through out the state and private university systems to create tailored education.

The biggest cost savings consequence to a system like this is that one excellent teacher can teach more students, share best-practices and spend less time doing it with advanced technology facilitating the collective informational and intellectual input of our nation’s best educators. 

Less teachers means less retirement and health benefits.  Fewer teachers means less sabbaticals.  Sabbaticals are a ridiculous concept that would never be tolerated in a traditional work environment and fleeces tax payers. 

Less teachers means school districts can value the individual exceptional teacher more than the group.  We need these exceptional teachers to lead our new systems.  Evaluate them and pay them based on the expected results based on the aptitude of what individual humans are in that teacher’s class.  Summer months could be utilized to update the technology and provide continuing professional education in subject matters and technology issues.  For some schools the idea of having summer off for school could be also be a variable that parents could choose from.  Why not year round education for those that elect it?

Teachers will be subject to more scrutiny valued more and can be compensated for that value as a professional and not as a cog in an institutional machine.  This will attract more dynamic thinkers to the profession.  Teachers will always be paramount.  Great teachers remain imbedded in us.  We must foster their power. 

Just as in the manufacturing base of America, the inevitable convergence with technology will highlight the aptitude and limitations of our workforce.  To truly excel, we must embrace these challenges and reward those willing to put the work in to lead.  Allow school districts to negotiate annual contracts with the best people to teach in these systems under state-based budgets just like those propose for heath facilities under section three.  Not doing this communicates that no matter how hard an exceptional teacher works he or she will only be rewarded based on tenure, collegiate degrees, and certifications.  This is incomplete and self-defeating.  Numbers do not necessarily have to decline, but roles and tenure-based defined-benefit compensation systems need to change.

Missions and Flexibility of Schools

Not every school is going to be the same and they should not be, because students are humans, not robots.  Schools certainly are not the same now and based on the current methods of funding allocation some methods of instruction create repetitive failures to accomplish a standard level of education across a student body despite consistent increases in funding. 

If we propose new and varied ideas about how a school could operate while at the same time requiring and mandating certain academic, disciplinary and personal responsibility requirements on both the students and parents to participate in that school then we can allow the personal choice and demand of the population of students and parents to guide what types of educational methods are preferable and should be selected for expansion.  By dictating a one-size-fits-all system catering to the lowest common denominator we are alienating productive students and teachers and fostering attitudes of apathy, hopelessness, and inconsequence.

By the nature of limited resources we can not offer, every child in America the “best.”  There are societal environments of varying levels of poverty, parental involvement, drug use, and crime that create a threshold of obstacles to overcome that can not be supplanted by simply opening another school, because of their realistic impact on the children and the related IQ levels, emotional, and disciplinary issues that such obstacles create.  However there are standard issues affecting all schools that must be considered before we can determine what different types of schools our nation needs. 

What we can do is offer any student or parent access to the best digital instruction over the web independent of their physical location.  This can bring the well-intentioned, but lowly educated parent to be able to empower their child and disrupt generational stagnation, by turning dinning room tables into schools.  This is particularly important to help the kid who is still trapped in a shitty school based on a W-2 and a zip code to usurp poverty by the efficacies of their own mind.

Discipline

Classroom discipline has acted like battery acid deteriorating the effectiveness of the American classroom.  The de-valuation of productivity-based education in our economy has led to generations of under-educated parents raising children who do not respect the educational process enough to abide by the assertive discipline of the teacher regulating that classroom.  Teachers become frustrated with their limited options and the negative overlapping effect impinged onto the other eager students in their learning universe.  How can we teach a child who does not want to learn and who would consider getting kicked out of school a favor?

We need to focus on the variables we can affect.  We can control who is in the classroom, how qualified the teacher is, what is taught and how it is taught.  We can control the societal consequences of not being self-sufficient.  We can also provide greater rewards for non-college-based education.

We need to be realistic about the impact of the overwhelming negative externalities some children bring to the classroom that effectively poisons the learning environment by consuming a disproportionate amount of the educator’s resources in addressing the needs of that individual.  School boards need to have the autonomy to effectively kick a kid out of school after a threshold of disciplinary offenses, remove potential government subsidies from the parents of the child after a threshold of offensives if utilized and put the burden back on the parent. 

In a world of a menu of educational options which all have entrance standards that may exclude certain students, one could argue we will be better capable of handling an individual’s psychological familial-based behavioral issues with a more adaptive digital environment that can resurrect a child’s educational self-esteem.  We can do this at a pace commensurate with behavioral remediation in a tailored alternative environment.  This may take place in a specialized non-profit charter or web-based class coupled with psychological counseling and guidance as part of the health care system outside any school to help that kid get back to a suitable school.  We need that versatility.

The sad truth is the government using our current methods is pandering to the idea that we are helping “lost lambs” and by penalizing the parent we are penalizing the innocent child.  The American taxpayers are not Tooth Fairies.  Hard choices are mandatory in educating our macro-level society.  Who are we really helping?  Who are we hurting?  Whose educational experience is being valued in this generational slavery of debt?

We have tried to revamp public education with programs like “No Child Left Behind.”  “No Child Left Behind” is not adequately funded to allow local educators to actually apply the federal mandates and does not give teachers the tools to fulfill its mission after a knowledge gap has been identified.  A revolutionized digital education infrastructure is that asset to fill the gap.

Funding has to have a consequence in education.  Systems should not reward failure to educate a child with applying more funding to further educate a child under an inherently flawed system.  We need to change the flawed system.  We will discuss the flaws of governmental budgeting policies and the inherent problem that encourages overspending in another section. 

Education is more of a privilege than a right.  A child that disrupts the education of the other children to a significant enough extent that the child would be considered for expulsion should be booted out of the system entirely until the behavior is remedied under the responsibility of the parent or guardian.  We can not ship kids around playing games, creating a magic school where all the kids with overt disciplinary problems go.  We can have juvenile detention centers, but the normal school system needs to be able to cut bait under defined criteria.  Without reasonable criteria we ruin the school under the threat of some kid getting beaten or mugged because he is trying to go to social studies class. 

If kids are left completely out of the classroom system then so be it.  The parent of that child is not getting public welfare or at minimum the amount should be penalized until that kid works to get back in that school through specific criteria, which could include web-based school work including discipline and economic consequence related videos for the parent and child and elements under the universal health care system for counseling described under section three.

Truth is the kid is probably fucked, may be headed for crime and a shit-life, in a shit-job.  How is that so different from now?  At least the piss-poor excuse for parents that procreated that kid into this world are not dragging down the kids from the parents who are doing their best despite what the world throws at them.

Penalties should apply to absentee parents living outside the household.  As part of a universal health care system, we should keep paternal linkages on file to cross reference with medical and public safety systems.  One addendum is that for children and individuals on public assistance, to cross reference paternity and maternity determinations to enforce these penalties on the parents of non-adopted children as well as child-support judgments where no father is legally listed.  Maybe that is not financially feasible for assholes that won’t even acknowledge their own children, but we could at least assess the possibility.   That is probably cost-prohibitive though for parent’s who abandon their kids.

In other economic situations based on IRS filings, we should consider wage garnishments as punitive penalties to the parents for expulsions to recoup administrative time parents abdicate to the educational system the taxpayer’s fund.  If we legalized drugs, criminal subsystems would diminish and it would be easier to pull teenagers in poverty-plagued neighborhoods back into school, because there would be fewer gangs and economic options that eschew school.

Maybe that is too harsh, but I would rather the negatives of that system, then the one we have now.  Look at third-world countries and the pains parents take to provide education for their offspring.  We have American parent’s pissing that opportunity away.  Why should we fund dangerous reckless behavior initiated by a child say over the age of ten?  Kids want to learn, but they need to link education with purpose and societal function.

Education is a primary example of the many blessings in America that so many parents in this world would sacrifice their being to allow their child to partake.  If those parents would give up so much to enjoy these freedoms so many Americans take for granted, why should we reinforce this type of behavior with our tax dollars? 

We can not save everyone, but we can offer everyone a chance to save themselves.  Misplaced compassion is detrimental to the whole in zero-sum budgeting in a nation buried under debt.  Ayn Rand may not have been fully right about her war on altruism, but somewhere in that muck, this generational slothful entitlement is the fucked up shit she is protesting. 

If the kid gets back in school and gets his act together than all the government assistance can restart if warranted, but we can not live in a nation based on the premise of an empty-threat parent when so many of our citizens ask other taxpayers to take on the role of their parent.  Good manners and decorum are not mandatorily correlated to income or an intelligence quotient, but typically are correlated to parental involvement.  

What is deemed to be a significant extent of punishment for the undisciplined student should be left up to the principal of that school and certainly expulsion would not be the first option under any disciplinary system.  However, in an environment where every threat to deter a student’s inappropriate and negative behavior is fundamentally empty, students can spiral downward without consequence and anchor others.  Shipping a student to another school district only compounds the underlying issues. 

With a digital infrastructure we could provide problem students with active tasks performed in an out-of-class digital interface as prerequisites for reentry into the standard school environment or before taxpayer assistance could be reinstated.  We could also provide disciplinary features such as video monitoring inside of schools to be replayed for a parent who believes their little angel could never perform such infractions.  We can provide drug education and counseling to both the student and parent through an improved healthcare system that could be administered at the school or a school or counseling center in the area.

Our schools should not be juvenile detention centers.  Some children simply do not want to be in school.  Some children have parents who are horrendously irresponsible.  Some children commit criminal acts in school despite their parent’s every genuine effort to deter such behavior. 

These are realities that in an unmitigated system causes the entire school to cater to the lowest common denominator, encourages healthy and positive portions of the student population to exit the system to seek a private alternative and produces the percentage of students who are producing educational deterrent activity to escalate from the minority of the student population towards the majority. 

This pushes kids with the benefit of monetary options out of public schools and into private schools for the privilege of this assurance to the parents and kids.  This evacuation hinders the public school system to maintain a natural bell curve of parental involvement and student input.

Every local school administration should be able to come up with its own code of discipline and enforceable punishments for enrollment.  These codes of conduct can be prerequisites for admittance and in communities with school choice can be evaluated by parents for where parents want to enroll their child.  However, I find it hard to believe that the lowest level of tolerance of some disciplinary allowances in some of America’s public schools should be acceptable for any child to endure. 

We are all linked and interdependent and when we let generations of children toil through second-class educational systems, we create additional costs to subsidize those adults, a weaker work-force and a void of productive function that affects our macro-level society.  I think the reality is in many cases parents will flock to the schools with more stringent standards and appreciate the government for providing this option.

Punishments could use public service projects, school maintenance applicable to the child’s physical abilities, wearing scarlet letters of dishonor ridiculing behavior or bearing statistics about the consequences of unfinished education or about the reality of second and third world countries.  Emphasize that education is a privilege not a right prior to expulsion.  Adapt perspective by making kids watch what it could be like growing up in Somalia, Yugoslavia or Guatemala.

These are just some of the disciplinary methods to re-encourage a student to interact in a positive manner with their greater school environment and encourage the minority of disciplinary problems to merge back into the majority norm of well-behaved students.  At the end of the day some kids are a lost cause and there is not an efficient system to educate them when they refuse.  Designing a system to naively push kids through where they have not achieved a confidence in their own ability to be self-sufficient is a disservice to everybody.  Offering digital repetitive lessons to allow a disillusioned individual student to catch-up for their own path to self-sufficiency at an adjusted pace is a key to progress.

Special Needs

Not every child was born to be a doctor, a mechanic, a pianist, or an engineer.  That is a good thing.  We each have our talents and weaknesses for a reason.  We need to continue to use student evaluations and continue to teach according to abilities, but utilize the dynamic tools at our disposable to best meet the needs of our entire student population. 

The reality is IQ’s do matter, learning disabilities are real and our intelligence quotient determines well over seventy-five percent of our capability in life.  We can not put gifted kids, above average kids, average kids and kids with IQ’s around eighty in the same classroom even in elementary schools and expect optimum results.  That is why tiered-learning works.

Advances in technology allow us to improve this segregation in our learning environments with fewer teachers.  If not, we will have some kids who are bored.  Some kids who are trying their ass off and just can’t keep up and some kids that just don’t care.  The challenge is being honest with the parents and students and allowing dynamic avenues for students to prove assessments wrong that do not trap students in a box for their entire academic careers, while at the same time encouraging the concept of Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences to link the individual with their aptitude that may or may not fit traditional norms.

We can not put so many of our kids on Ritalin or Adderall and say, “Oh now you’re fixed, why aren’t you performing?”  Sure for some kids the drugs help, but as a society drugs are over-utilized and less effective due to the one-size-fits-all system we are cramming the medicated and non-medicated kids all back into.

Students with dyslexia, ADHD, autism and other forms of “learning disabilities” have needs based on a biological differential in operating structure of their brains that can be unique and require understanding of that child.  These “learning disabilities” are often not an intelligence quotient measurement, but rather one of biological science that needs to be understood on a level of what transpires between the synapses inside a child’s cranium rather than a guttural discipline of ridicule of a child being slow relegated to lower-tier learning. 

The students in these percentages of the student population are probably more efficiently catered to in a manner benefiting their own unique needs with a classroom utilizing a digital paradigm of instruction capable of adapting to that specific student without mandating physically extricating that student from the social population of the classroom. 

Combinations of advanced visual and auditory material can be provided on a macro-level to meet the needs of a specific child.  The additional elements of auditory or visual stimulation in order to assist with a learning process could be made available and in some cases administered remotely.  A teacher in Missouri who is an aid for fifteen students with unique needs scattered across the country could assist fifteen different school systems and rotate on a semester by semester basis without having to relocate. 

School psychologists and educational diagnosticians could be expanded with digital technologies to coordinate video-conferencing meetings so that more children can be helped and specialized skills can be spread across more school districts.  Voice recognition software could digitize transcripts of interviews saving time on evaluation reporting. 

With a universal healthcare system and having doctors and nurses integrated into the educational facilities drug testing and medication monitoring could address drug problems on a proactive basis.  High schools could implement required random non-disclosed drug testing of students which is reported to school administrators and parents.  Concerned parents could assist our kids more easily to get kids off drugs.  Drug addiction could be treated as a healthcare issue. 

Schools could have their own nurse or doctor assigned via video conferencing since everyone is on the same heath plan to facilitate less missed days by students and employees.  Nurses could not cover major medical issues, but for the minor stuff we can have a less expensive medical services system support the needs of the student population with less disruption to the daily school schedule of all involved.  The nurses could then service other components of the community or other schools on a scheduled basis via video. This could also save parental leave time from our employers, by kids not having to leave campus. 

Connecting Education with Self Sufficiency

One of the fundamental problems with students who do not want to be in school is tied to the reality that the byproducts of education that have been shown to them in the adults in their lives is minimal and is not directly tied to their expected income potential. 

On one end we have the fallacies of a liberal arts oriented education on a college level.  There are tons of liberal arts majors with a low level of applicable job skills disproportionate to their advanced educational background and student loan debt.  I believe this occurs because a system of unionized educators act in their own escalation of commitment to their idealism to have others follow in their paths and thus reinforce their decision to confine their economic productivity into the theoretical rather than the tangible.  It is also because of governmental budgeting.

Although the benefits of the arts as a society are significant, the percentage of the post-secondary educational dollars dedicated to facilitate required credits and access to liberal arts expansion exceeds that benefit by a wide margin on a college level.  Arts, like religion, should be elected, not mandated once beyond high school.  Unfortunately that is the economic reality we live in.

"I must study politics and war, that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." John Adams 

Certain subject matters are luxuries to a wealthy, safe, and prosperous society.  Surely the arts are wonderful and valuable, but they are the beautiful skin over the muscles and bones of the body of our educational system.  We must keep perspective on our times, the strengths and weaknesses of where we are as a nation, and acknowledge the economic realities of where our investments are shifting with where our goals are as a people. 

In elementary, junior high and high school, kids should be exposed to the arts and funding should be commensurate to allow potential artists to pursue specialized schools for the arts scattered across our nation on a university level.  To some degree arts high schools where students spend a portion of their week are also better use of taxpayer dollars than putting an art or music teacher in every high school in a city. 

Random other high school students can kindle artistic elements to their personalities that will benefit other aspects of their adult lives and society at large.  Like most of life the balance is key, thus, not every state university needs an arts program.  It is far more practical to allow private schools or a single public arts-focused school in each state to meet niche needs.  Most artists also do not need a college education to be artists.  We can also have web-based clubs or instruction for some activities like chess, art, or music at lower costs to supplement the loss of full time instruction, if fewer great teachers can reach more kids.

If the primary objective a person goes to university is self-sufficiency than there is a realistic order in achieving that objective.  Too often the differential between the rights and privileges of educational endeavors is not conveyed to those we attempt to educate.  We can offer certain liberal arts but we should not make them non-major required electives at state-funded universities.

This differential represents a drain on the tax-base and educational talent pool of America by adults misguiding students into telling them, “You can do anything you want to and things will work out just fine.”  “You can spend as much as the person with the more economically impactful profession since your education level is similar.”  The reality is a vast majority of liberal arts majors are biding their time to conduct graduate work in the form of law school. 

As noble as that undergraduate decree in sociology, history or English appears; what mandatory relevance is that in a direct correlation to the study of the American legal system?  As John Adams put it, they are luxuries.  The timeframe of the higher educational system should be condensed to save costs and eliminate the archaic concept that because those before someone had to do something that all those coming after should have to jump through similar hoops to obtain the same concluded achievement.  Skilled knowledge is the key, not hoops.

Why couldn’t a student spend two years undergrad and then go directly to law school?  Why does everyone have to be such a well-rounded student?  The answer is money.  Higher educators are obsessed with the promulgation of their own self-interest to validate their life’s obsessions and concentrations. 

Young students are given an ever growing length of rope to frolic around deciding what they want to do with their lives without correlating the actual economic costs of stagnating a productive concluding choice.  This requires Americans to spend more on education that we are not requesting and in many cases not utilizing.  Create pay-for-the-exam and digital-app text book only digital web-based courses for all Americans now.  If I can demonstrate the knowledge, evaluate me and let me move on to more pertinent tasks.

Educational intuitions mandate hours under each pool of potential electives so that fringe classes can have enough students to substantiate the department.  If we gave students more credit to decide what they thought was useful in their own lives and conveyed the urgency and concrete necessity for specific and concerted action in the election of a student’s major, maybe students would take a more active interest in their own education. 

Maybe the disillusioned students who may not see the inevitabilities of educational success in the form of an undergraduate degree in “fill in the blank major” will provide can begin to see that degrees’ applied reality.  Students could participate in their own adapted process as the significant factor at achieving their own self-sufficiency from junior high forward. 

Advertise courses by showing digital excerpts on a college by college basis.  Create videos like movie trailers and Good Reader iPad presentations.  Then let students pick.  Maintain core courses for a major, but don’t’ require electives.  That’s why they are electives.  Reduce total hours required.  Call it a different degree if you want, like a major only.  If I know how to weld, I don’t need to know calculus or English lit.  If I know how to engineer a building, I don’t need to take American History.  Generation X is revolting under this debt.

On the flip side, put courses on the web and let me take them even if I am not “enrolled.” The university doesn’t have to give me a degree, just let me learn, because I want to.  I’ll pay for the level of interaction I receive and the exams I take commensurate with your cost, otherwise make it free, because all I am doing is watching videos on a web site on my own time of classes you previously taught to other people. 

If we as a society would not label students as “failures” for not valuing the same bachelor’s degree conclusion, we would all benefit.  Often that bachelor’s degree conclusion is not effectively correlated to a profession that meets the goals of a significant population of students.  We need to move a way from a one-size-fits-all education system and towards one designed on student and parental choice. 

Governmental Unions

In a free market system, labor unions predicate their agreements based on the fallacies of the wage earner and union predicting more fortuitous results of the enterprise to mandate earnings increases commensurate with the imagined rates of inflation in the economy.  Unions assume and too often require distrust of their own management.  Private unions are needed and warranted in specific industries, particularly manufacturing and construction, however governments are different.

Government institutions revenue and non-employee costs are not as directly linked with inflation, because their work products do not come in a saleable form integrated with supply and demand indexes predicated on pricing.  They are linked to social needs more often based on population.  There is often an economy of scale to municipal administrations that reduces overall non-employee costs.  Governmental entities do not compete.  Police departments, fire houses, and administrative buildings do not pop up to compete with governments pricing their services through local taxes at exorbitant levels.

So when we have unionized labor agreements inside governmental entities, guaranteeing much lower than market retirement ages, combined with defined benefit rather than defined contribution retirement instruments, we have a massive employee retirement cost that is unsustainable and foreign to everything we know in the free market economy inside the private sector.  The convergence of the governmental retiring at 55 generation combined with the cost of their replacements will cause the bankruptcy of states if let unmitigated.

In a free market commercial enterprise, unions evolved to tie retirement benefits to stock values through democratic voting by workers deserving higher wages and benefits.  Unions brought about the human right to access to healthcare.  Private sector benefits paid to current and retired employees may force the private entity to reduce the number of total current employees and increase the burden of labor asked of them.  It is critical that the costs of this dynamic be shared between employee and employer and often it is most efficiently resolved through free-will employment, but unions are vital in industries like construction, manufacturing and to a degree energy. 

Neutering private unions is correlated with some of the cannibalistic aggregation of wealth at the top of corporate American.  The pendulum needs to swing back towards labor on the wage-end more than the areas of retirement and benefits, where individual retirement accounts rather than pensions should remain the norm.

In a governmental environment, costs are born outside the entity by taxpayers, not the employer or the employee.  So when the benefits become excessive the taxpayers should have the authority to realign benefits with private sector standards prevalent in society as a fair and equitable median benefit.

One of the most powerful unions and roadblocks to progress in fundamental changes to the educational system remaining in America are governmental teachers unions.  The tenure system is a sacred cow, much like the non-existence of federal legislative term limits, which perpetuates in-action.  Teacher’s unions block bad teachers from being terminated and good teachers from being promoted not based on the quality in the classroom, but by merely subsisting and guaranteeing wage increases and promotions predominately based on length of service. 

Unions guarantee a rise in the average compensation paid per teacher, because of the seniority-based tenure system.  School districts are forced to keep fewer higher-paid older and not necessarily better teachers versus a more diverse work force with a mix of younger and middle-range lower-cost employees.  Seniority is often negatively correlated with the adoption of digital cost-saving technologies. 

Often talented teachers with middle-levels of experience are forced out of the system, because their needs are not being addressed in order to keep the oldest tenured teachers around, pay for the retired versions of the oldest teachers and fill in the gap less expensively on the bottom end with low-experience who cycle in an out based on budgets.  The occurrences of the demographics prompting this scenario will proliferate exponentially as Boomers retire.

If districts could retain teachers based on self-directed factors it would allow more flexibility in budgeting and a focus on the pragmatism of teachers and school boards to negotiate their own wage rates, as employees in the private sector do.  This of course would put the power in the hands of principals who could play favorites, but if we have un-tenured principals capable of being ousted by school boards or the boards of non-profit charter schools than a new type of check and balance could occur.  Currently cronyism has a way of putting people in cushy jobs like principals that once obtained through tenure are irreversible.  If we got rid of tenure and implemented Wevote.gov to have citizens more involved in local politics we could address it better.

Teachers need to be re-certified in the subject areas they are actually teaching in by taking online and oral re-examinations to stay in that subject area every year.  If a teacher can’t pass a digital test, what are they doing teaching our kids?  This could be easily accomplished through scheduled on-line examinations and video conferences with authorities in their subject area based on federal standards for the grade level and subject areas taught in a monitoring testing center inside the school on a group testing day each summer.  This would also provide principals with an additional objective standard to assist in evaluating instructor competency.  Some districts do this, but federal uniform software would save taxes.

This would require minimal time and effort from a good teacher.  Teachers often move from discipline to discipline and just because a teacher qualified to teach science or English twenty years ago, that certification does not mean the teacher should be able to step into a classroom and teach after being away. 

Teachers are evaluated all the time and most are great, dealing with problems nobody else wants to deal with, like the ramifications of parents that refuse or are incapable of helping kids with their homework.  But sometimes the teacher is a problem or is good but is overpaid.  Sometimes a teacher is unfairly asked to be a jack of all trades and a digital infrastructure would greatly assist in alleviating these extraneous responsibilities outside learning subject matter.  After five or six years in a position, there is often not that big a return for the taxpayer in the value to that instructor compared to a mid-level instructor. 

That is why school boards should have capped compensation by position after a threshold of years based on position to allow employees to stay in jobs they like and others to enter.  This could also work in the medical field, public safety and really government as a whole. 

Identify the most efficient learning peek for experience in value to the taxpayer; for a teacher this may be five years.  Whether it is a teacher, a governmental lawyer, a police officer, a soldier, a municipal administrator; set a standard salary for each initial year that caps at that year “five.”  Stay as long as you want to work, but in reality the differential in experience value between teachers with thirty years versus ten is not commensurate with the pay differential when assessing macro-level value to taxpayers and students.  This upfront open compensation communication would allow organizations to compete by using supplemental bonuses for individual achievements and not mandating a budget crisis based on the passage of time.

This change coupled with defined contribution retirement and the elimination of twenty-year vesting thresholds for defined benefit retirements makes more sense.  If we un-linked defined benefit retirement to seniority in government with 403b’s and 401k’s this sort of reform would be possible and far more fair.  The concept of capped-compensation positions posted via the web by school boards would allow school boards to better budget limited resources and better allocate payroll to value.  This logic could be shared by police and fire departments, municipalities etc, saving taxpayers billions.

The utilization of internet, video-conferencing, and video-monitoring technologies inherently reduce the quantity of teachers required and increases the quality of teachers needed.  These technologies expand the ability of teachers to be scrutinized on their in-classroom performance.  This scrutiny is diametrically opposed to the pursued goals of the current teacher’s union system.  However if districts and their lawyers, set more stringent standards on the discipline standards of students and thresholds of parental involvement to validate expulsion, in-classroom digital monitoring would be viewed more as a supportive asset to a teacher and a school system rather than a personal and legal liability.

The unionized system assumes a common competence and unified replacement value of the individual member resulting in greater compensation for the group than what could be individually negotiated by its members.  This lack of scrutiny reduces the standard of performance required to retain employment.  Teachers unions in America have fought extending the school day, while increasing the number of vacation day’s students get for their own free time. 

What other job in America, between all the student holidays and the summer is an employee guaranteed almost a quarter of the year off every year as an adult?  Make sure that when comparisons are done from a teacher’s salary to another profession with an eight-hour workday and twelve-month required attendance that the compensating factors to account for in some cases a six-hour day and an eight-month year are made.  Health and potential retirement benefits also sometimes allow teachers to retire after twenty or twenty-five years of service. 

For mathematical purposes, take someone making $50,000 a year on a job with the traditional 2,080 hours a year (40 hours a week times 52 weeks).  Someone working eight instead of twelve months and six instead of eight hours a day could make $28,125 and is technically paid the exact same hourly rate of $24.04 for what they work. That’s a difference of 910 hours less a year at work or 43 percent.  Add more generous and often taxpayer-guaranteed retirement and health benefits on top of that differential.

It is in the best interest of teacher’s unions to ignore this economic reality and try to compare apples to oranges when comparing annual salaries of other professions to teachers.  It is true that many educators work beyond the normal school day that may end at three p.m. grading papers or assisting with extracurricular activities, which educators may or may not be compensated in an additional manner.  Educators may spend their lunch hours on recess duty and summer or vacation time may be spent lesson planning.

The fact is that the overall math may not be as large as a disparity considering that additional work inherent to the profession, but there is still a considerable gap when comparing the average teacher to the average engineer, retailer, accountant, general contractor, or computer analyst.  Reevaluating some schools to function year round, on nine hour work days or on six day a week schedules that partner teachers that want to be paid more to work more with students who want to learn year round or in expanded settings is piece of the solution.  Digital assets make this all the more possible.

The American educational system will continue to fail until there are major concessions by the teacher’s unions of this country which recognize the fundamental changes needed and may ultimately lead to their non-existence.  In what may first appear a paradox I would argue that if we ever actually got a true single-payer universal healthcare system, it would be the death knell of governmental union labor in this country and also labor’s ultimate victory.

Guaranteed employment is gone in the private sector, why should governmental institutions be the last bastion of such costly and inefficient labor policies?

The Workforce

Students entering the workforce are faced with obtaining professional skills to work in the food-chain of corporate structures.  As a country we have divested the manufacturing mechanisms that created much of America’s growth in the post World War II economy to foreign countries.  We have become increasingly indebted to China by supplying them with a constant demand for their labor, while at the same time incurring a double-deficit to China’s economy by selling them U.S. Debt to finance purchasing many of the goods China’s labor produces. 

Much of the driving force behind this dynamic is that we have eliminated the potential avenue for U.S. citizens to make our own goods because we have not properly internalized the costs of foreign labor in the form of reduced federal and state tax revenues input to our government to the corporations outsourcing to cheaper foreign labor.  U.S. labor is burdened by sky-rocketing employee benefit costs which are not present in the Chinese economy due to a lower accepted standard of living and a less evolved free market element to their state-run economy.  As middle-classes grow countries like China, India and Brazil the cost-differential will narrow and American manufacturing may revive.

Kids graduating from high school and even in worse scenarios colleges, often have only vague or entirely distorted images of what certain professions are actually like.  How is a child who has never met a lawyer or a doctor as a family member or a family friend supposed to know?  Even then it is unlikely the child would ever go to work with that person or sit down and interview them? 

What if in the database of video teleconferencing and recorded instruction turned the idea of a high school career-day on its head?  Instead of random alumni or parents coming into answer questions, what if planned out “true life” reality television-style shows were prepared to show the life of an attorney year one to two, years five to ten, ten to twenty-five. 

Imbedded videos in software could follow people of a profession along their daily life pointing out the applied knowledge from classroom experiences into a practical application in a career.  On a federal level, we could do this for each type of engineer, business degree, and medical degree.  If each high school in America had a course where everyday of a semester the students would watch videos over web-based software to highlight the lives of these types of professions as an elective course, it would probably be the most desired elective in the school. 

We could have a set of standard “careers” that all students are exposed to and then the students could elect others under their own decision trees at their own workstations listened to over headphones.  A student interested in business, could see finance, marketing and accounting careers.  A student interested in agriculture could see factory farming, local farming, forestry or horticulture.

Academia would argue against the difficulty in grading and evaluating the retention of knowledge.  Certainly implanted multiple-choice quizzes could be built into the software.  Ask yourself, how many people feel like they have no idea what an engineer or a computer analyst does on a daily basis?  What does a lawyer really do?  We could also make these fully available to the public on a website and air some of the videos on public broadcasting television.

How do you think a high school junior or senior feels when trying to select a college and then a college major?  It’s like the entire education process is more concerned with pumping us full of classroom knowledge until we walk across the stage with a bachelor’s degree and all of sudden we are supposed to know what to do with our life with a degree for a career we only have a vague understanding of what that practical job may be really like.

If we integrate the reality of the working world into the classroom much earlier on, I think students would enjoy the opportunity to digest it and put some context to our unknown global economy that we hope students will contribute to rather than drain.  Maybe by seeing a future through the eyes of people outside of local environments, a student will begin to put a greater value and focus on the path to achieve his or her own version of a future. 

It is great when a parent can help guide and expose a child to the world around them and help foster that pursuit of self-sufficiency through a desired career for their child.  The reality is not every child has that parent or parents to help them.  This is one area where the federal education system needs to coordinate its efforts in a concerted and comprehensive effort to allow that child the opportunity to reach someone or to become exposed to someone that can.  Isn’t that what we all want for our children, for them to one day stand happily and firmly on their own?