How I'd Change Education

Alan Weiss's The Uncomfortable Truth®

Primary and secondary 1 End the “warehousing” of children • Chronology is silly and hundreds of years old • Socialization is important, but not at this cost • Move kids as they learn • Measure learning by outcomes: application, tests, etc. 2. Stop defaulting to college educations • Prepare for a range of employment opportunities • I sat next to too many duds in college • Teach life skills: civics, account management, do-it-yourself repairs (remember shop and home economics) • Growing tendency to hire competence and not credentials 3. End the teachers’ unions control of schools • Introduce carrots and sticks for teachers • The Rubber Room in New York City • Albert Shanker’s quote • Randi Weingarten’s $600,000 • The customers are the parents and kids, not teachers • Make the job rewarding and also demanding • Recreate school “open houses” • End the mainstreaming of behavioral problems • End the inclusion on non-English speakers • My experience with Tourette’s Syndrome • Teachers have lowest grade point averages and attend the worst academic schools • Former president of URI: People with poor finances and/or grades go to inexpensive and mediocre schools • Get rid of failed progressive nonsense like “new math” • Allow for school choice of all kinds with vouchers 4. Change school financing • The affluent/tax/attraction/more tax trap • Pool money within the state for equal distribution • Create true equal opportunity with equivalent resources, quality, teaching across the state 5. Enforce discipline • Assistant principle might go to jail for stopping a female, black student from heading for a fight, she claimed he physically abused her in doing so. She had threatened the fight. • Mandate school officers. Anyone who says that children are fearful of uniforms and police should understand they’d be more fearful of being beaten up or shot at. 6. Apply common sense and avoid political correctness and the woke • Teachers may not involve themselves with personal, sexual, gender, and similar issues without involving parents, including names kids use, how they dress, and how they want to be addressed. • Teachers’ personal politics, gender beliefs, and religious beliefs are not permitted in the classroom.