this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2024
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Basing these takes on a book I read about schools a few years ago. The Smartest Kids in the World. Some of it may be outdated or misremembered, but the clear one was how inefficient it is to have this many school districts in America. Overall cost of adminstration has gone up while teacher pay has stagnated.
Gotcha. I misunderstood a bit and thought you were talking about your local council or government representatives vs people like your District Superintendent.
It's been a while since I've taken a look at a local school district's organizational chart so I used the one here.
FWIW I pulled up a 2011 study that shows consolidation of most school districts has already been done to the point of maximum efficiency. It's also extremely detrimental to poor and impoverished districts.
https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/consolidation-schools-districts
Maybe their management shouldn't be consolidated but their funding absolutely should be, into a single country-wide fund. The districts should then be paid an equal amount on a per-student basis.
You might say that this doesn't account for differences in the cost of living between different areas. I say that it's all the better that it doesn't, because if the funding is set such that it is sufficient to fund education in the most expensive areas (and it will be because these areas have the most political power), the relatively increased funding will allow the poorer areas to catch up.
That feels closer to what I was hoping to articulate. We shouldn't be relying on the largesse of the voting homeowner class to fund our schools at a patchwork of levels, we should be dropping aircraft carrier money into schools and creating the most informed electorate in history.
I'm receptive to that. I'm the definition of a layperson, having read one "popular" book on the subject so I only have vague general notions a layer or so deeper than a completely naive person. In any case the main things I feel strongly about are paying teachers more (and paying very well qualified ones very well), giving them the leeway to dictate what they teach and how, and treating students as if they were innocent civilians deserving of respect and support, rather than... How we treat them now.
Hard agree.
I think a good start is more funding for the IRS and hitting the rich harder with taxes.