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Education
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Increase and improve standardized testing, in order to identify students who need extra help, and also to measure teacher performance and serve as a basis for merit pay to schools that perform better.
- Increase the frequency of testing.
- Have teachers create the questions for the tests, and subject the test questions to scrutiny through a review process open to wide public input.
- Institute a system that eliminates all possibility of cheating by students or teachers or anyone else.
- Ensure that all subject matter in the standardized tests is made known to all schools involved in the testing, so these can adequately prepare their students for the tests.
To meet needs better and ensure proper funding and cost-efficiency:
- Equally distribute school revenues to each district so all have sufficient funds to compete on a level playing field with the more affluent school districts.
- Reduce “student to teacher” ratios in the classroom; provide more individual attention to students, such as through tutoring.
- Encourage more flexibility in teaching methods.
- Eliminate federal mandates which dictate to states how to appropriate their funds, such as requiring them to spend more on certain categories of students at the expense of others, but rather, let local districts determine how to best allocate the funds to meet their needs.
- Offer incentives/bonuses to induce teachers from higher-performing schools into lower-performing schools.
- De-emphasize teacher credentials and seniority and place greater emphasis on merit and performance by teachers and students.
- Experiment with charter schools or other ways to offer more choice to parents within the public school system, but impose on these the same requirements for performance, standardized testing, accountability, incentives, and cost-effectiveness, as are imposed on regular public schools.
- Recognizing that lack of funding is not the cause of the failures of education in this country, shift the emphasis away from the need for greater funding and instead toward the goal of spending funds more efficiently, which could mean increased funding to proven efficient programs at the expense of inefficient ones.