The highest priority of my platform will be education, for from an effective education spring all good things. An uneducated populace is one that costs more money to maintain, that is less willing and able to protect the planet and participate in and contribute to the economy, and that costs us much more on things like health care, police forces, and many of our other significant problems that we deal with daily.
The first priority will be to do away with testing. Through testing we have put a huge financial burden on American taxpayers that when all is said and done shows absolutely no significant return. So a student scores an 80% on a standardized test while he or she is in the tenth grade--so what? This is not an effective predictor of the student's future performance, nor is it an accurate indicator of the effectiveness of that student's teachers or the curriculum of his or her school. We need to stop paying millions of dollars a year for something that gives no valuable return at all.
What we need to do instead is return the control of the schools to the districts, and we need to make the jobs of principals and superintendents much more accountable. We also need to raise their salaries so that we attract a high quality of person to those jobs--many of those jobs are filled by people who are underqualified or completely unqualified to do them, simply because they happened to be in the right place at the right time and the district happened to be looking for someone.
We also need to revamp our educational system so that the education that our young people receive is practical and relevant. We need to bring back shop classes, home ec classes (though we'll want to rename them!), and personal finance classes. No one should be admitted into high school who doesn't know how to balance a checkbook and budget for household expenses. Period. Students need to understand how taxes work, how health care works, how a sink and running water work, and how a sewer system works. We have raised a couple of generations of people who don't understand much of this basic information, and we've paid a huge price for that ignorance in the form of expenditures to fix problems caused by ignorance and stupidity. Ask anyone in Flint, Michigan, about the dangers of not understanding how a city's water supply is attained, stored, and distributed. Our entire infrastructure is in danger of failing on a catastrophic level, and much of the reason for that is the fact that most Americans don't understand exactly what the problems are and what needs to be done to fix those problems.
An educated populace also can make better decisions when voting. An educated person will be able to hear a fallacious argument and think, "Wait a minute--something's wrong with what she just said," rather than cheering mightily for lie after lie just because it sounds good. With a well-educated populace, we'll face fewer problems in our health care system because people will understand how to take care of themselves, and they'll be able to recognize and identify potential problems and dangers in their actions.
This is not to mention the benefits of growth and innovation that will come when our students are educated more strongly and more effectively. Many companies are desperate for people who can do the jobs they need done, and who can do them not just well, but exceptionally. In America now, many companies need to spend precious time and money giving their new hires special training to make up for the shortcomings in education that they bring with them. This should never have to happen, but it's become quite common.
We have a bigger problem than skilled labor, too--the problem of skilled middle-management. We have very few people who are true leaders moving into leadership positions, and they bring with them paranoia, insecurity, and fear that they'll fail, which cause them to be extremely ineffective at their jobs, which leads to loss of workers at lower levels, lower performance on the part of almost everyone, and very poor growth for many companies.
As I mentioned, the first part of my education reform would include returning control of the schools to the districts. The national government should function in an advisory capacity, creating resources for schools to use rather than trying to control the schools by controlling their finances.
Second, starting at the high school level, all students should be able to specialize in at least two fields that interest them. Why should a student who wants to be an engineer take four years of Language Arts? Four years of history or social studies? If we strengthen the curriculum of social studies courses, we can deliver the same amount of information in two years by making it more relevant to today's world, and the students can spend the time they would be in those classes studying more courses that will help them in their futures.
Our students could be leaving high school at near-expert levels in one or two important fields and strong base knowledge in several others. Now, though, they tend to leave with basic or just-above-basic knowledge in many subjects that will be irrelevant to them the day after they finish school.
We need to build more schools that are smaller and more streamlined, and get away from our huge schools that allow so many students to slip through the cracks. If we can do this, we can follow the model of some other countries in which teachers are hired by districts, not by schools, and they can give their classes in two or three smaller schools per week, as the schools won't be spread nearly as far apart. While there will be some adjustments and growing pains in this model, allowing students to attend smaller schools will allow for much more opportunity for personal growth and development.
And we need to pay teachers much more than they earn now, by the way, and allow them to do their jobs without adding tons of administrative layers to the work that they do, which keep them from focusing on their students and their subjects.
As we rewrite the tax code, we must write in guaranteed funding for all schools, obviously with provisions for dealing with schools that are providing poor educational opportunities for their students.
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