Two thirds of all issues come down to spending more money on education for the poor.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

Want to increase social mobility? Spend more money on education for poor people, making it easier for them to become rich.

Want to reduce racial inequality? Spend more money on education for poor people. Disproportionately many poor people are from ethnic minorities, and this is the best way to target them.

Want to improve the economy? Spend more money on education poor for people. This will create a larger skilled workforce.

Want to reduce the rate of unplanned pregnancies, abortions and unwanted children? Spend more money on education for poor people. Educated people are less likely to get pregnant accidentally.

Want to reduce unemployment? Spend more money on education for poor people, making it easier for them to find jobs.

Want to reduce crime? Spend more money on education for poor people, making them feel less excluded, and giving them more options, making them less likely to turn to crime.


There are a few major issues it won't do much for directly - the environment, gay rights, separation of Church and State etc - but for a vast majority of social evils, the best cure is to spend massively more money on education for those people who otherwise don't have much chance of achieving a decent start in life. "Poor" is, of course, a slightly blunt definition - "underpriveledged" might by better - but it has the massive advantage of being easily objectively measureable. The objective of the "class war" should be the elimination of the poor, not of the rich.

[LWolf]

1. Education is a crucial issue that is abused and misused.

In my professional opinion. Everybody is quick to blame schools for all kinds of things, but nobody is willing to provide the funding, and the permission to restructure, that is needed to make schools places that really will nurture social class mobililty. Legislation these days, requiring "one-size-fits-all" curriculum, instruction, and assessment, does the exact opposite. It sets up an environment that makes it difficult to meet the needs of everyone in a classroom.

Increasing funding to education, so that we can structure our buildings, classrooms, and instruction around what we know works best, would be one big piece. I would love to have more time, space, and resources to give intensive attention to all of my students. To spend time with their parents, to know the sources of their troubles, and to individualize their instruction to meet their unique needs. Please send more money our way. While you're at it, repeal the legislation mandating standardization of curriculum and instruction, so that we CAN provide instruction based on individualized needs.

You have to look beyond the school doors, though. A large number of poor children start kindergarten so far behind their peers that they never catch up academically or intellectually. Why? Because brain development begins in the womb, and the development that happens birth-age 4, before they ever hit the school doors, is the most significant in terms of later intellectual outcomes. If we want poor kids to get the most out of their educational opportunities, we have to start sooner, in the homes and communities that have been forgotten and left behind.

We need to make sure that all people have access to safe, adequate shelter and healthy food. We need to make sure that all neighborhoods are safe. We need to provide adult job training and jobs. The best way to reduce crime, imo, is to provide abundant legal opportunities. We need universal parenting classes during gestation and beyond that teach parents about the kind of environment and human interaction that encourages healthy brain development. We need to bring "culture" in the way of libraries, books, theater, art, museums, etc.. to the neighborhoods of the poor. We need to open the doors that provide opportunity for personal growth and development to the families of poor kids as well as better serving the poor inside classroom doors. Their life outside school has a bigger, and longer-term impact on their futures, than what happens in school.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

2. I have mixed feelings about standardised curricula

On the one hand, they clearly create a lot of uneccessary work for teachers, and they make it harder to aim work at specific pupils. On the other hand, my impression from talking to those of my friends who are schoolteachers is that the main thing stopping them aiming work at specific students is the other 30 children in the class, and standardised curricula do have two big virtues, I think: firstly there are a non-trivial fraction of teachers whose choice of curriculum would be heavily flawed if it was left to them, and secondly they allowed standarised examination.

If one of the things you want from an education system is to increase social mobility (and it is), then you need it to be able to help bright children from poor backgrounds get jobs. To do that, you need not merely to teach them to be able to do those jobs well, *but to convince employers that you have done so*. It would be lovely if the only goal of the education system was education, but unfortunately it can't be, I think.

I think the British system (I don't know about the American one) goes too far, probably far too far, in the direction of standardised curricula, teaching to the test and hoop-jumping. However, I do think it absolutely crucial that students leave secondary school with a marketable qualification, and for that you do need at least a semi-standardised curriculum, I think.


As to providing instruction based on individual needs, I think that allowing teachers more freedom to write their own lessons would help a little there, but as long as they're trying to teach large classes one-size-fits-thirty isn't very much better than one-size-fits-thirty-million. Smaller classes is the only way to achieve that, I think.