For some reason, my friends seem to expect
me to have the answers to the world's problems. I don't but I have had
experience with several of them and have unusual solutions based on my
experiences.
I spent ten years working on improving the public school system (President of the Service Committee on Public Education and partner of Dick Raymond in the Portola Institute). In the end a solution came to mind but I didn't have the drive or life-focus to work on implementing the solution.
Schools systems, unlike other local urban bureaucracies don't have members of their constituency die from school incompetence. The exception is where a kid comes in and sprays bullets. The problem is that the education itself is terrible and plenty of law suits for wrongful education would result in bureaucratic change. But there is no such thing as a wrongful education suit; just wrongful death suits. Sewer systems get fixed with law suits for wrongful death and the threat of suits, so do parks, streets, electrical grids, transportation systems and traffic systems.
In lieu of law suits to fix education by
demanding 'best practices' we have to change the bureaucracy so that
good teachers migrate to the classroom environments where they can
prosper and leave the classrooms where they are impediments.
The answer is a National Seniority and Pension Portability Plan. The NSPPP would allow a teacher in a big city, with five years experience, who is bored and frustrated with her class and the violence she has to subdue, to transfer to a suburb or ex-urb and keep her seniority and her pension.
The
opposite will happen too. A teacher who is exceptional in a suburb and
wants to try her skill in a more diverse and complex environment could
transfer to a big city school with no adverse effect on her income,
pension or seniority status.
The consequence of seniority and pension portability would be movement of teachers to the teaching environments they like and to teaching environments they find rewarding. Teachers are the key ingredient in education. Teaching is what needs to be supported, rewarded and encouraged. Good, exciting, enthusiastic teaching that is.
(Footnote: I use teacher examples as female. That is the way it has been so far in my life and will certainly be for the rest of my life.)