As the country gets deep into this year's election cycle, the subject of education has become a hot topic. Very recently the United States as a whole found out that a little myth was not true. We are not one of the top countries in the subjects of math and science. This is another reason why the American public, is increasingly concern about its children's education. Combined with the high dropout rates of high school students, it's obvious that our current system is not working.
The politicians will try to convince us that they have the solution but I will bet that they don't. Most of them probably want to keep the status quo. Their children for the large part don't fall victim to being at an underperforming school and they are beneficiaries on how the system in currently run. There is no magic bullet answer on how to fix the system but there is one solution that would very useful. America needs to do a full scale audit of the school system.
County by county, state by state, the American people need to needle through the records of their school districts. Our country spends about 10000 dollars per year on each student. So before we decide if the schools need more or less money let's find out where all the money is going. At the current spending rate multiplied by the average class size of 23 students that is 230,000 dollars in every classroom. That means less the 50000 average teacher's salary there is about 180000 dollars that we the people do not actually know where it is going.
Don't get me wrong I understand that the schools need building maintenance, desk, and they have to feed the children. That being said how much are we spending on all this stuff and who is getting the contracts. Are those people over charging us because their brother makes the decisions on behalf of the board? Not saying that all school boards are corrupt but like all politics there is a lot of corruption involved. One thing we can do is utilize our right to the records as citizens. It is our duty to make sure our government entities are running the way that they are supposed to.
This is not just an issue for people with children but for all Americans. All of us pay taxes that go to the public school system. When a neighborhood is known for having good schools the property values go up in that area. Also we as society can only benefit from having well trained and educated young people to drive this country forward.
There is already pressure on the instructors to make sure that, the children pass standardized test. Now we need pressure on the administration to utilize our finances the correct way. Maybe we can shrink some of these class sizes, hire more support staff and upgrade our technology. At the end of the day we need to audit our public school systems to get the most bangs for our buck.
