A fantastic use of education money would be to create a software program to replace redundant work now performed by human teachers. Imagine if the government asked Google to write a program which would produce the kind of people they would like to hire? Pre-k to graduate school. Then any child, alone, or with the help of a parent or with the help of a public education teacher could be guided at the optimum pace for their ability. Then this would be accompanied by non classroom activities like sports, music etc. Now that's a big education infrastructure program that could be implemented with very little new spending and possibly even reduce education spending simply by redirecting funds. It would also be an infrastructure project which would benefit all students world wide, not just for one country.
Internet as an infrastructure is an interesting concept but I don't know who benefits more from it. I don't mean between the poor and rich in the US but between developed and underdeveloped countries. I tend to think it is a great equalizer between the rich and poor countries. With the internet, it is no longer that expensive for poor underdeveloped countries to set up a good education system. Case in point, Coursera, the free internet online education system runs mostly by our top universities for free to everyone who wants to learn and I think more students from underdeveloped countries benefit from it than our inner city kids. For several years I took classes offered by UC Irvine, Stanford, U Penn... through Coursera, on finance and economics to get myself educated so I can understand your language on trading. There were online chats, class discussions and I think based on their language skills, many of the students were foreigners, probably from India and China. A lot of the US students were like me and very few youngsters. So, you can build the best infrastructure but if your students are only interested in sports and rap musics, you won't be able to build a competitive workforce even with the best internet infrastructure.
We certainly spend the most but I am not so sure. Perhaps our very best equals their very best but.... Have you attended or seen any free public schools in South Korea, Japan, Australia, UK, Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, India and for that matter all of Europe?
If you test predominately white American suburban students they test off the chart leaving Finland in the dust.
https://onlinelearninginsights.word...imed-filmmakers-book-on-how-to-fix-education/ You can read more in this hated book.
If you test predominately white American suburban students they test off the chart leaving Finland in the dust. ____________________________________________________________________________ Finland is considered to have one of the leading education systems in the world. Finnish students consistently score near the top in the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, for reading, mathematics and science while the U.S. is ranked below average. There are countries in Europe where english is their second or third language and they still beat the USA students in english testing scores by a wide margin, that is absoutly pathetic. We may have very good universities, private & charter schools, but our public schools have sliped to below average being in the bottom half internationaly. http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/06/opinion/sahlberg-finland-education/index.html
I hope you are right but how do we know that our best is better than their best? By many measures we are not the best: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/27/best-education-in-the-wor_n_2199795.html https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/dec/07/world-education-rankings-maths-science-reading http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/05/asia/singapore-smartest-kids/
They already have this in a lot of countries. Home schooling or school of distance. I did it many years ago when we lived out on a property that wasn't near a town/city. Used to get paper workbooks (before internet days) to complete the state curriculum and whatever study materials were needed sent out by mail and send it in to a central office when completed for marking. I think its all been switched over to digital now days and everything is done vie internet if the child has internet access. What I found of interest are these internet based schools being trialed with "swarm" learning (Not sure if that's the technical term). Every child is encouraged to participate and bounce ideas off all the other kids in the group and they are allowed to self explore directions of interest. Supposedly it has resulted in some amazing mental growth in children as they are pushed into whole new directions of looking at things in ways they wouldn't normally as individuals or within a structured learning environment. Saw it on some science program awhile ago being trialed in India but the idea originated in the US from memory.
You are missing it. America tests higher than Finland if you only test students, both white and black, in the predominately white suburban schools. Our pathetic national test scores are low because our failing predominately black and hispanic inner city schools bring down the average. So the problem is not spending or methods.