Our Failed Education Discourse

We'll leave aside for a minute the fact that this guy is a Libertarian working at a PUBLIC college, and instead focus on how he perfectly encapsulates the failure of "reformers" to understand anything about how schools actually work:

The City of Newark, actually the teachers and parents, should create no more than 200 neighborhood schools for 200 children each that would replace the current brick and mortar schools. In other words, every neighborhood would have at least 3-5 schools for primary, middle and high school aged students. In short, real school choice would be created by decentralizing the schools, thereby eliminating the need for any busing of students.

Vacant office space, churches and other similar institutions, community centers, or newly built facilities would house the new neighborhood schools. An endowment fund would be created from the funds received from auctioning off the current 75 schools and used to rehabilitate existing facilities or help defray the cost of the new schools. 

Each school would have 10-15 teachers who would be responsible for teaching and day-to-day administration. One principal could oversee 10 schools in the city, visiting each school once every two weeks. Each teacher would be paid from $60,000 to $100,000 plus benefits. Benefits typically add another 25% of the teacher’s base salary to the cost of employing one teacher. There would be no need to have a union since the teachers, parents and the “district” principal would set the salaries.

The salary and benefits in each school would be approximately $1,500,000 (12 teachers at an average total cost of $125,000). Let us make it an even $2,000,000, if schools hire support staff for a variety of jobs, including security, secretarial and other duties. If there were 200 schools in Newark, the total teacher and staff costs would be $400,000,000. The cost of the district principal would be let us say $175,000 per annum would be spread among 10 schools. The total citywide cost for principals would be $3,500,000.

Add another $50,000,000 for school operations (textbooks, supplies, etc.) and the total cost of Newark schools would be less than $500,000,000, or approximately 50% less than the current budget of the Newark schools.

Wow, it's so simple! He's just cut the Newark school budget in half - AND he's made the schools better!

Of course, we'll have to figure out who is going to do 90% of the work that principal was doing, since she's now going to be traveling to 10 different schools. Oh, heck - everyone knows 90% of the time principals just sit around anyway...

And all unions ever do is set salaries; workplace conditions never into their purview...

And that ratio of 10-15 teachers per 200 students will workout fine too. Because all of the kids with special needs - ranging from physical disabilities to learning disabilities to psychological problems to autism to dyslexia to giftedness - will just suddenly run right into the middle of the bell curve. And all of the specialized subjects like music and art and PE will be taught by... well, we can figure that out later...

And let's not forget how people just love having schools in their neighborhoods, so zoning challenges won't be a problem. And I'm sure all those abandoned office buildings have gyms and libraries and playgrounds and stadiums...

See how easy it is to fix our schools? Especially if you never spend time in them...