[Aggie93]

Here are a few quick thoughts. If i get time, I’ll develop a few later.

Parent Involvement
I think the biggest determinant between good schools and poor performing schools is the involvement of the parents. This is why suburban schools are considered better performing. I know both my girls (grades 5th and 7th) have a lot more homework than I ever did. Fortunately, my wife and I have time to help them with it.

Conversely, it also seems there are a lot of parents that too involved. I have a high school friend that taught in a private school (religious affiliated I think) school. He said dealing with the parents was the worse aspect of the job. Everyone thought their little Johnny was perfect and would go to battle against the teacher and the administration would not back the teacher - needs the tuition.

Out of school activities.
A lot of kids are in activities several days a week. and often these activities have a level of commitment that I never dreamed of (travel teams as an example). My oldest daughter has been in ballet for eight years now. We have made the decision that it will be just an activity and will not pursue it seriously. It is not uncommon for kids to have something every day of the week. Both my kids have something three days a week and I think that is getting close to too much.

Khan Academy (changing teaching methods)
I’m sure several of you saw the 60 Minutes segment on Khan Academy. I think a lot of good points were brought up. If you have not seen it and are interested in education, i recommend looking into it. I think the best development of using KA, is teachers can focus their efforts on the students that need help. They have the students do the background work at home (reading the chapter) and discuss it and do the problems in class. This lets the teacher teach instead of just reading to the class.

This method of teaching can be universal and help all schools, but would have a greater impact on poor performing since it would allow teachers to to help poor performing students instead of their parents doing it. Don’t get me wrong, parents’ number one priority should be their kids education, but I think we need to give up on working with ideal situations. The segment also showed the better students helping others. This did shock me and not sure how well it would transfer to other schools, but is upside to this strategy.

Teacher Unions
I do think teacher unions have been more detrimental to the overall system. It is almost impossible to fire teachers and poor teachers need to be eliminated. Not only for the kids, but for the teachers. Poor teachers can find a better fitting job where everyone would be better off.

Need to stay creative
I used to think that schools should drop some of the arts and other type of classes and focus on the reading, writing and arithmetic. I’ve changed my stance over the past few years. I think one area that the US has an advantage is we have been more creative than most other countries. I think more needs to be done on teaching how to think, how to problem solve. In college I started in the business school (finance major) and switched to liberal arts (econ major with finance minor). I think there was a significant difference between the two. The business school was more focused on teaching you stuff, whereas the liberal arts was more how to think. While in the workforce, I’ve been very disappointed the level of problem solving capabilities by most people, including the curiosity to learn.