[komali2]

Ideally we'd abandon this weird psuedo-capitalist idea of education and just convince our government that education is the best investment a country can make.

An educated populace will devise better defense technologies and strategies. An educated populace will create more efficient means of production. An educated populace will strategize better trade deals. An educated populace will create more cultural icons that attract foreign tourists.

In other words, yes, open-source the lesson plans, and increase the education budget by 500%.

[namlem]

Throwing money at the problem isn't necessarily going to help. Tons of poor school districts have gotten major cash infusions and produced nothing to show for it. The money needs to be spent efficiently. Power needs to be taken away from administrators and given back to teachers. Also, bad teachers need to be fired.

[komali2]

Why do bad teachers exist? Why do we have tyrranical, shitty administrations?

Giving a million dollars to a homeless drug addict would kill him within the week. You don't solve the problem by throwing money at it, now.

I said increase the education budget. That's not just money to schools, that's money to education research, schools, teachers, after school programs, parent outreach, and all the other weird little things people don't think about when they think about education. It would shift our country's cultural and political policy towards education - if teachers are pulling 120k salaries, the expectations for their performance would be higher. More people would seek out the extra difficult training to become a teacher because the rewards are worth it, much like people are willing to spend 10 years slaving through medical school for a prominent, well-respected, highly paid job that involves helping people.

Right now the only people that teach are the genuinely good people that are willing to take 24k/year salaries minus personal expenses on classroom supplies, or yea, the shitty people who couldn't figure out what else to do.

[germinalphrase]

Open Education Resources (OER) is already a thing - but access is so fragmented between different websites and organizations that I've never found it particularly useful.

Additionally, it often takes as much time to find & modify OER to fit my classroom needs as it does to simply make it from scratch on my own.

[r_smart]

Assuming you're talking about the US, we already spend more per student than pretty much anybody else. I'd argue we spend plenty, but if we're going to inflate education spending, why stop at 500%? Why not 5000%? We can print as much money as we need!