More about education-- Will has posted something I actually agree with, more or less. His proposal was what I was going for before, though he said it much more clearly. My idea was essentially to have the schools in an area band together, so that one could be a vo-tech school, one could be college prep, one could be arts/writing/whatever, and so on. This would save money while giving students more options. This cluster system would reduce the cost of busing (which is much higher than most people realise-- more than 2% of my county's budget during my senior year).

And while I don't approve of the really rigid tracking that German schools use, and I don't think there should be any tracking until high school, I don't have a problem with a flexible tracking system in high school. This system exists already in most high schools, though it's self-selective. The kids who take the AP classes (and most kids who take one AP class take a bunch) end up taking classes together, while other students take all their classes together. The system I'm proposing would be essentially self-selective too; a student decides which school he or she wishes to go to and the curricula would be complementary enough that s/he could change after ninth or tenth grade. Ideally the schools would be integrated enough that changing schools wouldn't be hard on students who lost friends, but that's something that would have to be tested.

I have two problems with Will's proposal as written. One is that he seems to be proposing for-profit schools. I've heard no stories that for-profit schools work. I know the experiment in Philly has been a disaster (in terms of money, though I understand the education offered was pretty good), and I don't think any Edison school has turned a profit. Unless you can find a drastically different model, I think the government is probably going to have to administer the schools. If the schools are for-profit (or even if they're not), I'd want some sort of oversight committee, to make sure the schools are teaching appropriate material and to certify new schools in the system. I also am not sure about the constraints Will suggests. I don't think requiring a school to accept all comers is feasible and I think that if a student and requiring integrated schools doesn't work in all districts (Amanda probably has something to say about that, but my school system was 10% white and the city of Atlanta was under 5%. How do you integrate this? This is hardly a unique problem. How many rural counties are less than 5% black? And I'll bet that the urban school system in every southern city is less than 10% white).

One more thing before I go to sleep. I think it's time for the federal government to chip in more money for education. Two reasons. One, there's something fundamentally wrong with saying that someone who went to school in New Jersey gets a better education than someone who went to school in Mississippi. I don't think there's any way to come close to equalising the schools without federal funding. Two, the reason the communities were originally supposed to pay for schools was because they were getting the largest benefit out of having well-educated children. In the world we live in now, this simply isn't true. Well-educated people move around to wherever the jobs are, and I'm sure Atlanta with its abysmal school system is benefiting from the adequate to good public education in the Rust Belt far more than Rust Belt cities are. So why shouldn't Atlantans pay?