On education

The media is full of dire warnings about how American schools stack up to schools in other nations.  The general consensus is we're falling behind, and evidence of this slip goes back to the 1970s when our students began to test lower than other students globally.

Remember the seismic shift that occurred during World War II where we escaped the devastation that other nations faced?  That coincidentally is also when we were at the top of student test scores.  As the nations of Europe rebuilt, their factories came online and their social institutions such as schools followed suit.  We can see that turning point reflected in 1970, when we first began to have major manufacturing competition, and our wages plateaued. Test scores follow the same pattern, where our students resumed roughly the same level they occupied before the war broke out.

That's not to say there aren't problems with education in America; the largest being local control of school districts.  The theory goes that the closer a service provider is to those using the services, the better, and more efficient the delivery of those services will be.  In many ways it is a holdover of the nation's founding, where Americans were skeptical of centralized government as found under a king, and preferred decentralization to spread power and responsibility among many entities.

The problem is this results in at least 50 different education policies, as each state has some kind of state-wide educational authority.  Within each state are any number of school districts to administer education to those students.  In effect, for every 20,000 students or so, there is a whole bureaucracy that must be paid and maintained to administer local education at a district level.  Depending on its size, a city may have one or more separate districts for elementary education and others for high school education.

In a time when resources are scarce, why do we cling to a model of local government that duplicates effort so often?  Surely this isn't efficient.  It may also be harmful to students.  By uniting two districts, the cost in administration saved could provide improvements in teaching such as computer use, better teacher salaries (for those that have earned them based on performance), and better buildings.  The local control model is costly, and for what benefit?

In general terms, to be a successful American my children need to know certain things.  Are these things different in one district in one city than they are in another city?  Are they different between states?  I understand regional emphasis on agriculture in the Midwest for example, but the basics aren't that different--math has universal application, as does basic reading and critical thinking skills, regardless of where they are learned.  Are parts of our nation so much different that we can't centralize the education system to use money to educate children instead of feeding a monstrous web of hungry bureaucracies?  The answer to that question is pretty clear.