How to fix American Education:
Privatize. Nothing else matters.
Public school education in the U.S. (on average) is still incredibly abysmal. Righteous Reason, might have a good point about privatization. It is now coming, no matter what the public education establishment desires: Online education in the U.S. exploding. I wish I had online resources when I was growing up. The publicmind prisonschool system was helpful to me, but it was also restrictive and prevented me from reaching a greater potential, IMO.
Public education treated me pretty well. I really can't complain, considering that my parents weren't shelling out the equivalent of the sixty grand a year that a friend of mine pays to send his two kids to a private elementary school. In fact, they didn't shell out anything, although they paid property and state income taxes. There are a lot of charter schools in Philadelphia. Here we see the miracle of privatization: it doesn't work. There is no miracle there. Overall, they aren't doing particularly better than the public schools, and some of them are criminally mismanaged.
Online education is the future. It's really a different paradigm, and will be particularly good for the slower kids. Although it's not exactly online education (as in Khan Academy), my kid now does his homework using Google Docs. I think that's great. (He's in a public school, and a damn good one, I might add.) Public schools aren't always great. When they fail, most of the cause is usually the parents, social dysfunction, and poverty. I don't think there are any magic solutions for this, at least not if you want to keep the Bill of Rights in force.
