Making Changes - Part Three

A friend recently commented on a blog about Charter Schools. She stated: “The real solution to fixing education and closing the achievement gap in America lies within improving our public school system. We need to have equal funding, lose "tenure" for teachers, have higher teacher accountability, and better teacher incentives.”
As you can see her comment made suggestions of how to correct our public school system, this got me thinking about things I would do if I had the power to “fix” the school system. Here are just a few of my ideas and suggestions I would present to a board of people that could help in my crusade!
• Equal allocation of resources, including but not limited to funding, supplies, and access.
• Rid schools, teachers and classrooms with endless stacks of paper
• Make administrators into facilitators and rid the school of useless personnel
• Use funds on education of students, not unnecessary whatnots
• Find every dollar possible, not only rely on government funding
• Planning before building/tearing down a school (school design should emphasize and support student learning – not based on modernism)
• Activity plans that contain measurable outcomes, with dates and assignments of responsibility for implementation
• People other than the teacher (some teachers) connecting with their students
• Restructuring and reorganizing the resources of time, money and facilities
• More hands-on art, science and computer projects
• Integration of all subjects across the curriculum – instead of allotted blocks of time each day to learn reading.
- Through a national project called Nature Mapping, fourth-grade students in rural Washington learn reading, writing, mathematics, science, and technology use while searching for rare lizards.
• Put writing back into the education system, and teach children not to rely on spellcheck
• Bridge the gap between teachers and parents, no matter how you have to get there
• Requiring teachers to adopt new best-practices
-With new technology teachers can use Middle Web, Teacher Leaders Network, and the Teachers Network to be informed of such practices
• Stop teaching to the test
• Make schools encumbered by unions and bureaucracy
• Teach the truth (like the real story of John Smith and Pocahontas)
• Increase teacher salary (ie: stop giving all the money to celebrities and put into education)
This is my short list, more to come soon 