A Simple Plan to Fix Education and By So Doing Fix America

Peter Schrag wrote in The Sacramento Bee, “Tight Budgets Needn’t Halt School Reform Planning,” Jan. 23, 2007, on the Governor’s Education Budget cuts, “It might be nice for once to do some thinking before more money was spent.” John Edwards’ education plan has done that thinking on the national level, implementing large pay raises for teachers and creating a National Teaching Academy comparable to our military academies.

California needs a quick fix and data to validate the fix. So far the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on education have produced no quantum improvement or the data to indicate what is necessary for that improvement. With a combined sixty nine year of public school teaching, my wife and I have concluded that the millions of dollars spent on education should be spent to attract the very best, the most qualified teachers. Californians have constantly heard throwing money at education is not the way to fix education. Not throwing money at education will guarantee failure. The mistake is not throwing money at education, but the way that thrown money is used.

High pay usually guarantees quality workers. Let’s pay each teacher a starting salary of $100,000 with a top of $250,000 and see how long it takes for California to once again have our education the envy of the world. The total budget for California in 2006 was 67.1 billion dollars. For example, had we paid each of the 292,012 teachers $100,000 their salaries would have comprised 43 % of the education budget. High salaries will attract the brightest and the best – creating one educated generation after another. All the No Child Left Behind fixes simply waste money and precious time on unworkable innovations.

If a teacher is well-educated, loves his subject matter and strives to develop his teaching skills to maximal efficiency, then his expertise will follow. The prospective teacher will thoroughly prepare himself before he applies for a teaching job because the hiring with become extremely competitive. The morale of the hired teacher will rise because his skills are rewarded which is a societal validation of his professional worth. His students will have added respect for their teacher because society values him as evidenced by his large salary. His best students will want to become teachers.

Critics will say teachers do not deserve such salaries. Nothing else has worked so let us try this very simple idea for ten years. Let’s see if teachers indeed are worth the salary and the high trust the public places in them. Nothing that all the think tanks and the universities have come up with has worked so far. Let’s enjoy watching teachers earn their salaries by educating all our children. The results will be so exemplary the system will be used throughout the nation. All innovation begins in California; this one is long overdue.

Many will say that this idea oversimplifies the problem; this fix is too simplistic and therefore cannot work. Education however needs a simple fix now. Let’s call this idea the Simple Plan to Fix Education (SPFE). This idea is always discussed but never tried while hundreds of unsuccessful fixes have failed.

In my thirty-eight years of teaching, I observed that teachers who were well-educated in their fields, who loved their jobs because they knew they were qualified and were teaching their students successfully, who usually had other incomes to supplement their teaching salaries and were satisfied sacrificing pay for helping society were always the best teachers. Every teacher cannot afford a financial sacrifice for the luxury of teaching. Raising pay, guaranteeing teacher expertise and making teaching especially attractive as a profession, will return California to its former position as the world’s educational leader. California, the nation and the world will benefit from this transformation. Let’s have the courage to try to work out the devil in the details of this plan.