My thoughts on educational reform...

So...education.

It feels like they got it all wrong over there. Here's how it should go.

The Feds are the Enterprise. They dictate policies, standards, procedures and offer services that most States should take advantage of.

1. This allows a nationwide consensus on what an American level of education "is" at this point in time. It will change over time. The current "is" will be described by setting down policies for the country to follow, voted on by the State Administrators each year. Annual reviews of the current state is demanded in the standards. As long as the procedures meet the standards, they are deemed successfully written. Constant annual improvement is an expectation.
2. This saves the entire country a ton of cash by using shared services.
3. This provides strong common services to every State in the Union at an optimal price. It will always be better than what the vast majority of States can pull together. It frees up the local resources to focus on the procedural activities, helping the students in their State more directly. Any State found doing it better is, first spending more money than they should by not letting the Fed assist. Second they are going to be asked to provide the relevant policy, standard and procedure changes that caused them to be superior and help the Federal Team come up to that level.
4. This will have an affect on the State such that they can reduce their local expenses by relying on the Enterprise services, which by definition are high quality, redundant, constantly improved and relatively inexpensive. No reduction of staff will likely occur because, ideally, staff is relieved of some effort but required, by these same policies and standards, to put more effort into areas that actually HELP the kids.
5. For example of an educational topic: the policies will say that American History must be taught. The standard would dictate the who, why and what are taught. The Enterprise would maintain a default set of curriculum down to the syllabus level. However, each State picks how they want to teach. This is reviewed annually by a cross discipline team to ensure that changes to the standard that occur over time maintain commitment to the policies, and any changes to the procedures maintain commitment to the standards.
6. An example of an administrative topic would be student attendance tracking. A service would be offered on the cloud that would eliminate the expense for every school. HID card readers would be installed on every door and a card given to all faculty and children as their ID. There is no entering the building without a parent or student card or an escort. That card recognizes when the children walk in or out any door (without manual scanning, just proximity), and therefore can be used for a variety of information points. That data can be sent back to the local school to help make decisions on how to surreptitiously help kids keep to their schedule and make it to class on time of their own volition.
7. An example of an immediate benefit to the children: administrators will benefit from the lessons learned by thousands of schools. Not just the experience and impact of 5 principals over 20 years but hundreds of principals that feed those 5 and make them even better.
8. An example of a necessary policy to make this work for the society: Guiding Principal #3 - Time saved through shared services is not to be looked at as cost savings. That resource should be kept on staff and be groomed as a local center of excellence to assist in the continuous improvement of the school and the overall Enterprise.
9. Another benefit to the children: schools can be assisted in adopting the latest lessons learned in teaching like how to get challenged students over their hurdles.
10. Another benefit to the children: the gifted children will be part of a well planned education ecosystem from an early age. They will catch on. They will learn it and they will take with them into adult life. Wherever things are NOT like this, they will change them. Especially if we can maintain a culture of self improvement vs hardened educational labor. There are all kinds of kids. We can get all of them a level of education that is hands down better than the average today. Once we prove we can do that, we just keep getting better.
11. A benefit to the Administrators: numbers start to bubble up really quickly and it will be obvious that 80% of the the challenges, the easy ones, are just a shared service away. The other challenges, the 20% that remain, are the hard ones that are difficult NOW like dealing with asshole kids who don't really want to learn. With the 80% gone this opens up resources, time, and hopefully money that can be spent trying to tackle THOSE issues and get that little bastard to remember his times tables without pushing little Jimmy off his stool. And this is solved for the country. Not just for one school. Every lesson learned goes up the chain, it's success is monitored and if it's beats the rest it becomes a standard and every kid in the country benefits from it.

Now, to be honest. I don't know how far off this is from how we are now. I mean, I know the HID thing isn't implemented but, how much might be...so I'm looking into it.