How to Spend $100 Billion on Education

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Why do you not include in your report (as elsewhere reported) that the education fund includes funds for "Organizing For America" which trains high-school students to be community organizers? We may as well live in China, where children are indoctrinated...sad, read this article sad. http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=521994

Sue of WI 1:21PM February 24, 2010

Hi! ThnErFYE

rRkETtld 3:01PM January 04, 2010

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wakemansqu of AK 10:39PM November 22, 2009

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waldontard of CO 12:57AM November 05, 2009

The worst thing about the stimulus money is that it perpetuates all the expensive overhead, waste, and administration that the No Child Left Behind law created. Federal interference and now stimulus money is just building into the education system evermore worthless waste and paper pushing. Whereas if things got really tight and people started to take a hard look at what was fundamental to a good education it would be all the federal crap that got chopped. That’s why the feds are dumping in money now. It is the only way they can keep themselves in the game.
What has happened is that with the feds pushing the development of top-down management into the education system, administrators are now more important than teachers and find themselves on the chopping block instead of overhead, worthless testing, and administration, just like happens at any over bloated failing company.
Yet everyone knows that the teacher is the most important component of a good education. Common sense dictates that money should flow into the classroom to support the students and teacher. Administration in a functional organization is just there to support the teacher. Communities and parents that stop to think agree. Because of this the feds had to push money into the system to save teacher’s jobs to keep everyone fat dumb and happy about what is really going on and stall for time to get their agenda all firmly in place and institutionalized. For surely, if parents and communities saw all their teachers getting the axe they would start taking a far more critical look at where all their tax dollars were going… and become mindful of how, behind the screams of crisis, the feds are angling to seize power over education and siphoned off their critical tax dollars to throw money at special interests and publishers that are having a feeding frenzy at our children’s expense. All under the guise of testing…
Think I am crazy? In San Diego, which is one of the biggest districts in the nation, the district administration is following the feds lead and sucking all the money out of the classrooms to fund testing and tracking while laying off teachers and pushing up classroom sizes. They have taken so much money out of classrooms that now their budget for enterprise tracking software is more than the entire elementary education teacher’s payroll. Fortunately, communities are beginning to wake up and rebel and are making serious efforts to break away from the school district and take back their schools to again serve their students and communities instead of servicing the feds and their special interests.

Jack Jackson of CA 11:42AM April 24, 2009

For over 3 years I've been trying to find a group who might collaborate on one very fundamental step toward the improvement of education in every classroom every day, namely by developing a relatively objective system, almost an algorithm, for identifying Best Instructional Practices. It does not seem to be in anyone's vested interest to do so. Below you will find my early effort. For ease in making the critical point I have relied on my own work in improving pedagogical science.
Cordially,
Anthony (Tony)V. Manzo, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus, UM-KC; CSU- Fullerton (ret.)
http://bestmethodsofinstruction.com/
Best Methods of Instruction
Beta Site for the Teaching Optimization Rubric & Choice (TORC) System: a Reflective Model for Identifying and Classifying Good, Better, Best Practices in Classroom Based Instruction
Printable Versions :: Main Site | Listen Read Discuss
TORC Rubric | Listen-Read-Discuss Method | Home | Contact
You may wish to Skip to the actual TORC system ahead
Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger. Franklin P. Jones
FEAR NO TESTS: There is No Crisis, but it is past Time to get serious about Quality Teaching
There is no "crisis" in education, and we should not act as if one exists if for no other reason than because CRISIS conjures panic, a search for culprits and competing disruptive reformers with vested interests in everything but education. However, it is past time to take some measured evolutionary steps whose benefits could be globally far reaching.
A logical place to begin this stage forward evolution is with teachers and teaching. So much of teaching is management, improvisation and bureaucratic demands that we owe it to teachers and schools to at the least help them to calculate and inventory the most powerful instructional platforms available for day-to-day teaching. Most all who teach are now facing a new global emphasis on accountability. The version thrust upon schools is properly called High Stakes Testing. This is a fitting term. There are severe penalties in the USA for example if national assessments fail to show Annual Yearly Progress (AYPs), though somewhat lesser ones in other English speaking countries. In general, when targets are not hit, jobs can be lost, principals demoted or re-assigned, and even schools dissolved as students are given vouchers to go elsewhere. There has been considerable and worthy research of the factors that characterize effective schools and failing ones. Oddly, the flip side of the accountability movement has not been seriously answered, it is the identification of Best Practices, a banner term in Education more than a serious movement. Ironically, the real movement to identify Best Practices, or tools, now reaches across industries.
There has even been a business patent issued on how to identify and promulgate Best Practices (US Patent: System and method for determining and implementing best practice in a distributed

Anthony V. Manzo of CA 2:27PM April 18, 2009

nice, really nice!

Invexixheli of AL 10:28PM April 16, 2009

Education won't improve until society changes. As much as we like to ignore the elephant in the room, a student's enviornment outside of school affects their education. What they live with and are taught away from school, comes to school. I, as a teacher, cannot change that, but I am held accountable for the results. Maybe I am just jaded, and it is time to leave, but pouring more money into education won't fix the problems I have in my classroom. Neither will constantly changing the standards, or the way we assess progress, or making the school year longer, or taking children from the cradle and putting them in school. I do not have a solution, but I can also say that I have not seen anything resembling one either.

harkac of GA 9:53PM April 16, 2009

First, I think that education needs to be more specialized for each student. I attended an elementary school where we switched classes and subjects like HS. In Math, English, and Social Studies there were three levels, we were able to attend the class that best fit our needs. The lower class was given more attention and resources while the upper class wasn't held back and could delve deeper. It was amazing! We need to realize that those with special needs are not just those with disabilities or underachievers but also those who overachieve but are being held back by our school system-literally being dumbed down by hour after hour of boredom and never really learning anything.
Second, I am a substitute teacher and it amazes me how many classes I go into with appalling behavior, not just for me but on a regular basis. I watch it prohibit a majority of the students from concentrating and learning. This has to change. If there is a longer school day, the kids need a lot more physical activity! We had three recesses plus lunch when I was a kid. I think that discipline needs to be taken to a new level. How is it that my elementary school teachers taught 35 kids (through all 6 years) and kept the class focused plus did playground duty and detention and tutoring after school for those who needed it? My classes were 1/2 ESL/minority kids. Parents didn't attend our conferences or help at school then either. What has changed in 20 years? Why is it impossible now but they all did it then?
Third, Pay our teachers more but make it dependent on IMPROVEMENT in student scores. Teachers teaching disabled or impaired student should be exempt so as to not penalize those teachers who cannot improve scores. Find a balance that makes sense but students failing year after year and getting farther and farther behind is no longer an option. Also, those classes whose scores are held up by those few advanced students who always do well will have to actually teach them too because their scores also have to improve not just stay above the mediocre.

SRae of CA 1:50AM April 15, 2009

Funding and Focus should be on existing schools and students in K-12. Parents that want to send their student to private school,charter schools, or vouchers have the right to do so, just not with taxpayer money.
Do not fund: Early childhood education is basically gov funded day-care. It is quality day-care but still by grade three there is no significant value.
NCLB is a failed program! Money tied to tests does nothing more than have districts require to "teach the test."
Do not fund and stop social promotion! Test in grades 1, 3, 6, 9 and 12 with one set of tests. If the student cannot pass the test they must be held back. Better to hurt a child's self esteem in grade one and teach them to read than hurt their self esteem in grade 12 and teach them they will not be able to hold any type of job that will support them. Waiting till grade 12 to find out a student can't read is way too late.
Fund teaching with creativity to each students needs. This will help in interest in learning, innovation, and staying in school.
Fund and promote states that fund education out of their budgets. Education is a state issue and not federal.
A ton of money should go to "parent education." Not only in the importance of reading to a young child but in having them teach their children to respect authority. The verbal abuse teachers take today is unacceptable. Parent's have every excuse in the world as to why Johnny didn't do his homework, didn't have time to complete the project, had rude behavior in the classroom. If parents think they are too tired now to work with their student then they better take more vitamins because Johnny is never going to leave home and get a job!
Do not fund Superintendents (district, county, state and federal: including Arne Duncan) that are not required to have taught in the K-12 system and hold a current teaching credential. I would not hire a Kindergarten teacher to run a business, and we shouldn't hire business managers to run education.
Administrators (K-12 and college) make too much money in comparison to educators IN the classroom. They are not running AIG they are to be running an educational system.
Fund and we should teach on a basic year round program where roughly every three months is a two week vaction.
Fund and we should have longer teaching days Monday - Friday. Add at least 30min K-3, 45m 4th-6th, 1hr to 7th-9th and 1.5hours to 10th - 12th. Saturday and Sunday should be days off.

P from CA of CA 9:27PM April 14, 2009