From Today's Wall Street Journal: Better Schools, Fewer Dollars

We know how to fix public education.  The truth is many have, even whole countries.  The real question is "Do we have the political will?"

"http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303822204577468783242379036.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTSecondBucket"

"States and the federal government face severe budgetary constraints these days; how are policymakers supposed to improve student achievement while reducing school funding?"

"Public schools are inefficient for many of the same reasons that the Department of Motor Vehicles and other government bureaucracies are. In her book Educational Economics, University of Washington researcher Marguerite Roza shows that public school inefficiencies are largely the product of burdensome regulations imposed by a top-down organizational model. School districts collect money and allocate it from a central base according to a variety of bureaucratic rules, only some of which make sense. Schools themselves have little discretion over how to use their resources."

"Consider the way public schools spend money on their most important asset: teachers. According to the Department of Education, teacher salaries and benefits account for about 54 percent of public school budgets, which surely suggests that they should be structured in a way that maximizes those dollars. Instead, teacher salaries depend entirely on two criteria that, the evidence shows, bear little or no connection to a teacher's effectiveness: years of experience and number of advanced degrees. As a result, schools must pay higher salaries to teachers who may not be more effective than teachers lacking advanced degrees or with fewer years on the job. A more efficient system, of course, would direct capital to the teachers whom the school most wants in the classroom, regardless of what their résumés look like."

"Schools don't need more funds; they need the freedom to use their funds as they see best. That can happen only if the restrictions of the current system no longer bind them. A better system—one that the United States should begin moving toward—would be a taxpayer-funded one of relatively autonomous schools. Every school would become, in effect, a charter school. Districts would still have a role in this kind of system, imposing performance standards that schools would have to meet to keep their doors open. But it would be each school's responsibility to adopt sound policies and use its resources wisely."