Our Education System

So to talk about our current educational system and two ways to solve it I need to analyze what its state is right now. Right now our educational system runs on a fast food model. The teacher stuffs as much information into the student as possible so that it can be regurgitated back out on tests without the student every having any "real" comprehension of what he or she learned the entire class. The system is a quantity over quality, the focus is on the information without understanding and it may work in the short term, however, looking at the long term learning any information will not and does not work with this current system. 

The first way to fix our education system is to start with the instructors. Our current tenure system with teachers is hideously broken. Let me evaluate on that statement: tenure can be a good thing, it helps teachers have a sense of job security and let's good teachers stay at schools. But it is a double-edged sword because some teachers who have tenure can slowly start to give up as the years go buy. Teachers, in my opinion, are the most important part about our educational system. If a teacher is passionate about something no matter what it is; that class will become interesting. I know this from experience, all through out my school life every teacher that was considered "good" or "one of the best teachers at the school" were not the classes with the easy A or the fun subject it was always the class with the most passionate teacher. No matter what the subject is, if the teacher is invested in it as his or her class is, it will be a good class. That's why tenure should not be based on time, but on performance. Now how this performance could be evaluated could be difficult. If they system let the students decide through interviews or performance then they could easily let the easy A teachers pass if they think that teachers that REALLY want to be teachers might not get jobs because students might find their material too difficult. But honestly I would rarely find that happening, because if you need students if rise to the occasion, most will. Which is why teachers should be paid by how good they are not how much time is put into it. You know, like almost every other job in existence, if you do it well you get paid more not if you do it crap for a long time.

Which leads into my second point, our education budget should be higher if we want our system to be better. A lot of people always say "children are our future", but it's amazing how little they are willing to sacrifice for our future. Because especially in California, when we needed money instead of raising taxes our education budget was cut. Then again, and again, and again. Now our education fund is a husk of what it used to be, and our public schools are suffering big-time for it. So if we want kids to stay in school and be excited for it then shouldn't we invest more in it? With such little resources its no wonder kids don't get much out of school. It can feel so empty and shallow and it hurts our teachers as much as it hurts our students. I've known and know plenty of teachers who have had to pay out of pocket of the resources they require for their lessons in day to day classes. It has gone to a ludicrous amount now, with such little funds schools are closing left and right and classes become incredibly overcrowded. So if we want to end it we need to give back and end this cycle instead of continuing this loss onto our children in the future.