Fri 17 Jul 2009
A plan for improving education
Posted by admin under 2009 Summer, 2009 Summer Young Greens
[4] Comments
Bringing it home with tax cuts for test scores
by Lewis Pollis and Terrence Banks, Green Party of Ohio
For years our country has struggled with education. Once the envy of the world, the United States’ public education system now leaves its graduates unprepared to enter institutions of higher education or the work force. Many college students waste their first years taking basic English and math courses they should have completed in high school.
Politicians have promised to solve this problem for decades and have come up with several ideas like: extending the school day, lengthening the school year, and most recently the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. NCLB offers financial rewards to the schools whose students perform best on standardized tests, which are usually the schools that have the least urgent need for money. While some proposals may have marginally bettered the American schooling experience, it doesn’t take a straight-A student to see that by and large, these solutions have failed to significantly improve the system.
With few possible actions left to improve schooling from an administrative standpoint, we must instead turn our attention to the most important proponents of a child’s education, his or her parents. A small handful of devoted students will always provide their own motivation to succeed given the opportunity. Unfortunately, for most kids, all the tests, technology, and teachers in the world will be ineffective if the learning experiences of the school day are not reinforced by educational stimulation at home. Such musings are cliché and have been repeated ad nauseum at every level of government from local PTA meetings to President Obama’s major speeches.
Yet, while parents nationwide either do not realize the need for their help, intentionally abdicate their responsibilities, or simply lack the time and energy to offer assistance, the government has never put forth a policy to encourage their involvement in their children’s education. Now is the time to break that streak. We must invest in our children and our future by investing in involved parents.
Instead of using schools’ overall test results to allocate resources to the already successful schools which do not need the help, use the individual students’ results to reward the parents—give them a tax break if their child passes each exam.
This is not to say we should implement a pay scale to reward naturally gifted children, nor should we turn the testing process into a game show by handing out cash to the top-performing students. The tax credit would be given on a strict pass/ fail basis.
The tests should be designed so every student has the intelligence to pass and so it will be easy to reward any parent who takes the time to sit down and help with his or her child’s homework.
We must invest in our children and our future by investing in involved parents.
A tax break would create a renewed parental interest in education. Even a slight cut, as small as, three percent would probably be enough to get Mom to spend a minute looking at junior’s homework or for Dad to help him study for a quiz. The tax credit would also allow working single mothers to skip that overtime shift at work in favor of working out math problems with her daughter.
Imagine the improvement in our educational system, just from that small change. A measurable impact would likely be noticed within a year. Imagine if parents save the money from the tax credits to help pay for college tuition, then a better-educated society will lead to a stronger economy. So the investment is not only important for our society, but also logical economically.
Besides simply being a logical solution, an educational tax credit would exemplify several of the Green Party’s Key Values. In allowing parents of underprivileged households take a bit more time off of work to help with their children’s education, we help create equal opportunities and economic justice. We would encourage parents to meet their personal responsibilities, and help ensure future stability.
“Government…cannot turn off the TV or put away the video games,” President Obama has said. Although he is right that “these are things only a parent can do,” we can certainly offer parents some extra incentive.
Lewis Pollis is a new member of the Green Pages Edit Board. He is entering his senior year in high school and was editor of presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney’s “Power to the People Campaign” Newsletter.
Terrence Banks will be attending The Ohio State University in the fall and plans a double major in Biochemistry and Political Science.
Lewes Pollis & Terrence Banks
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As a public school teacher, I am so happy to see Greens active in fixing our Educational system. Many great points have been made and yes, many points need fine tuning. But the main point is seeing Greens invested in changing our current educational system. Thank you!
Good thinking but it does not address the basic problem. We are using a 19th Century format to try to educate 21st Century children. We try to train workers, not educate tomorows citizens. You should know you have been through this mill. There are some experimental schools around the country but this problem is never going to be solved from the grass roots up, it will have to be implemented from the top down and the present Dept.of Education does not even seem to be aware of the source of the problem. They know there is a problem but they concontrate on money, pre-school and graduate education.
If you are interested in working on this problem please see my Blog at Thebestpublicschoolsever.blogspot.com and check out the Change.Org site under Education . Keep up the good thinking!
First of all, it is good to see young Greens having a more prominent voice at the national level!
Second, I think this article assumes that parents have no incentive to teach their children at the moment. However, I think that children who tend to do poorly in school have parents who do not have the time to invest in their children’s education. Life as an American is not cheap. Many people work 8+ hours a day at their job(s). 71% of Americans have graduated from high school while less than 25% graduate from college. There are many reasons that this happens, not purely because of academics. Some people need to find a job after high school to support their families. Some people cannot finish college for the same reasons or even to pay for college themselves.
I cannot speak for the K-12 education in Ohio or the rest of the country, but in California (which ranks in the top 5 worst states) the fiscal irresponsibility of the State Legislature and voter-approved initiatives are crippling the ability of schools to fund materials needed to properly educate our youth. We have, for the most part, phenomenal teachers but they would need to be superhuman to teach the next generation with the current (lack of) support they receive from bureaucrats.
It won’t work, for exactly the same reasons that NCLB doesn’t work. Your money will go overwhelmingly to people whose kids are passing anyway, and you exacerbate the “teaching to the test” problems rather than improving actual education by actually giving the parents, and not just school administrators, a financial incentive to do so.
Tax breaks only work for people in taxable brackets. The poorest school districts are made up mostly of parents who can’t get much, or anything, in tax breaks for the same reason their school districts are poor — they’re poor, and their income isn’t in the taxable range. They need that second job to feed their families — they’re not going to spend the extra four hours a day helping their kids with homework. In addition, the sad truth is that most (not all, but most) poor parents are not as equipped to help with homework as the middle class and wealthy, because the linkage between low income and low educational outcomes is multigenerational. In every way, you’ll be handing out money mostly to people whose kids are already high-performing.
You’re also caught in a capitalist paradigm, while trying to solve a socialist problem. Public schools are pure socialism. We as the citizenry collect taxes from ourselves through the decisions of our elected school boards, who in turn hire a CEO and a financial administrator to establish curricula, hire staff, and pay bills. Outcomes are not established by, or measured in, capitalist motives of profit and loss. The continuing emphasis on this by everyone from right wingers to well-meaning left-wingers is the main thing preventing schools from improving.
We have a lot of socialism in this country, and we need to acknowledge it and study how it works both here and in other countries that operate successful socialism on wider scales than we do. Our military is socialist, and we know we can’t win wars by paying soldiers per kill. Likewise we don’t pay letter carriers by the letter, yet the postal service carries more mail, and at much lower cost, than any private company, and without taxpayer subsidies.
You have to start looking at different quantification systems that have nothing to do with financial rewards if you want to solve the problems of education.