You don't want there to be good schools that some people can get into and and garbage schools for everyone else. What you need is a high minimum standard that every last school in the nation has to adhere to and it shouldn't be possible to graduate from any of them without being able to read at grade level.
Whether you want that or not depends on what you're trying to achieve. China has pursued basically the approach you're talking about: focusing on key province to advance them to the cutting edge. The last time China participated international high-school testing, they published scores only four Beijing and three other wealthy provinces: https://www.milkenreview.org/articles/are-chinas-students-re.... And those scores were spectacular! Clearly that approach has some merit if your concern is competing with other countries rather than domestic equity.
I do think it'd be smart to support programs for gifted students and to screen for them. Those programs should be available to anyone in the US who qualifies regardless of where they live or what kind of money they have. Every student should be allowed and encouraged to reach their potential.
Your first point is in tension with your last point. A large fraction of the student population has a low ceiling of potential, and it’s very expensive to try and push them past that ceiling. The focus on doing so sucks up vast amounts of money and teacher attention that then gets pulled away from gifted kids.
That’s why sober and clear-eyed countries like Germany conventionally sort students into tracks starting around age 10.
> Your first point is in tension with your last point.
It really isn't. Every student should have access to quality education that meets them at their level and challenges them. Money spent doing that is not wasted on the vast majority of students. We do not need to have trash tier schools for the majority of the population so that a select few can get better ones.
Identifying where students are at and what their needs are is a good idea that would enable kids to be moved to classes where teachers can work with them at their level. It doesn't necessitate refusing a quality education to anyone. Even students with special educational needs and disabilities deserve a good education.
When students are placed in classrooms according to their level it means that no teacher is pulled away from gifted kids, because those gifted kids have their own teacher working with them. It doesn't mean that children who aren't gifted can't get a high quality education. Putting kids in a class too far above or below their level is not delivering a quality education to them.
Giving every child an environment where they can learn to the best of their ability is expensive, but it's nowhere near as costly as not doing it. Uneducated illiterate children become uneducated illiterate adults and voters. It's not a coincidence that most prison inmates are functionally illiterate. Having a good education enables more children to have a successful future.
The way it works now is that 20% of the bottom students eat up 80% of a teacher’s time and resources. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing depending on what your goals are. What I am saying is that you can’t have everything. You have to choose. This system this comment describes and the system your comment below describes cannot coexist.
That just means that we need to move the bottom 20% of students into their own classes where they can get the extra attention they need. That means they can get a high quality education and so can everyone else. You do not have to choose. You can have both.
No, you do have to choose because money for education (or anything) isn’t unlimited.
There’s a real question of how many resources and what kind of ROI you’d get from trying to educate that bottom 20% to the same level.
I saw this play out when I was in school: profoundly intellectually disabled students getting 1:1 or even 2:1 teaching, trying to get an 18 year old to be able to read 3 letter words, while AP classes were bloated to 30+ students.
> No, you do have to choose because money for education (or anything) isn’t unlimited.
The US is the richest nation on Earth. It can easily afford to educate its people. If you really think we'd need to find new sources of tax dollars to fund that, I have a whole lot of suggestions for where to start and I'd bet that you can easily think of a few low hanging fruit yourself.
> There’s a real question of how many resources and what kind of ROI you’d get from trying to educate that bottom 20% to the same level.
The ROI is massive. As I've said elsewhere, uneducated children become uneducated adults. Adults who vote. Adults who, if they lack the education needed to live successful lives, end up costing society in many ways over far more years than they spend in school.
I don't know about you, but I want to live and work with people who are educated and literate. If I were looking to move to another country for work, I'd want to move somewhere where the people were educated and literate. Especially if those people were going to be my boss, or my neighbor, or handling my food, or in charge of my visa application. Having a well educated population is pure win. The cost of ignorance and a lack of the kinds of skills a good school teaches is staggering.
The US already spends significantly more (both in absolute terms, and as a percent of GDP) than other developed countries, but with worse outcomes (particularly for non-white, non-Asian students).
The question is whether anyone actually expects the outcomes to change if we throw even more money at the problem, or if it'll just get gobbled up by teacher's unions, administration, and silly things like non-phonic instruction or DEI programs.
We are in a record amount of debt and we are about to go to war again. That’s not including the fact that we have a shortage of teachers who are underpaid. As for “new” sources of taxation, increasing the burden on the middle class is yet another way the bottom 20% eats up 80% of the resources. Tax the rich? Unfortunately, if you tax them high enough, they will just leave. They haven’t been patriotic since the last century.
They're a good example of why we shouldn't have that. It wasn't DEI that made them crap it was letting people buy their way in and shifting the focus from education to networking for nepo-babies. George W. Bush is a prime example of a massively uneducated idiot who had no problems getting accepted to and graduating from Ivy Leagues.
If teacher pay made a big difference in outcomes, expensive private schools would have very well paid teachers. But private schools typically have lower teacher pay than public schools.
Teacher pay doesn't have as large an influence on student success as it does on how many people are willing to enter the occupation and stay there. Private school teachers typically deal with far fewer students in the classroom and in much better conditions. They also don't typically have to spend as much of their own money on basic school supplies. Improving conditions at public schools and lowering classroom sizes would help to attract teachers too.
Washington state has the highest public school teacher pay in the country (over 100k/yr). It also has educational outcomes which are middle of the pack. That correlation doesn't hold in many cases. Oh, and the fact that half of the funding for the district goes to administration doesn't help either.
You need to have both. Training/credentialing and pay. Just one is insufficient.
Longer/better educator training both increases skills/outcomes and is a gate for the poorly-suited. Higher pay makes the training seem worthwhile and increases stickiness/tenure.