A Real-World Solution to Rotten Inner-City Schools
Last month, I wrote an article on reparations. I did it with tongue-in-cheek, but the strategy would work.
The plan is to provide a high-speed Internet connection and a cheap Chromebook to every inner-city student in America. To keep the Chromebook and the Internet connection, the parent would have to show that the child was progressing, week by week, in the Khan Academy. You can read my article here.
Any well-funded nonprofit foundation could run a test on this. The test would involve 1,000 students in each of three major cities. The crucial one would be Detroit. Here, the schools are legendary for their incompetence. The poverty level is high. White liberals have no expectations for improving the schools. Neither do black liberals.
If my estimate of $600 per student is correct, the foundation could test my plan in three cities for under $2 million.
The Khan Academy is the equivalent of a charter school: a charter school for homeschooling families. It would be easy to run a highly successful charter school by using the Khan Academy. The school could keep the teacher ratio at 35 to 1, which would make it profitable. There would be very few disciplinary problems. I think there is an entrepreneurial opportunity out there for somebody who would do this. But that's for another article.
Now would be the time for a foundation to inaugurate the test in homes. Schools all across the country are going to homeschooling this fall. They already have. So, resistance to online education is low.
The main argument against home schooling online is that inner-city students do not have access to the Internet. A foundation could solve this problem for 3,000 of them as a test. It could put up a couple of million dollars for a test to see how students would do.
The students would do well. The Khan Academy's program is academically advanced. It is being used in public school classrooms.
Because those parents who would sign up for this would be highly motivated, and because they would put pressure on their children to do well in order to keep the high-speed Internet connection and access to the program, I am certain that the academic performance of these students would exceed the academic performance of kids in local schools. Also, it would cut down on the expense of educating the students in the local schools. They wouldn't be in the local schools.
The results would be positive. Word would get out that inner-city students can get low-cost education that is far superior to the education that they are getting in the public schools today. There would be demand by parents to become part of an expanded test. There is high demand for charter schools. There would be high demand for this. Students would not be sent into the high-risk environment of the local public schools.
The headmasters might be grandmothers. In inner cities, grandmothers are basic to caretaking for children whose mothers have to go out and earn a living. Grandmothers would be competent to do whatever is necessary to make certain that the students are watching the videos.
If I were employed by a nonprofit foundation with a lot of money to run educational experiments, I would push this experiment. The place to get cooperation would be in inner city churches. They can get the word out. There are also other inner-city associations that do charitable work. Start with the existing network of people in the inner cities who want to improve the lives of the residents.
There would not be much resistance from the school districts that have gone to online education. They know that they cannot gain access to those homes in the inner city that are not hooked up. They are taking a lot of flak because of this. They would regard this experiment as a first step in getting the students back into the public school system. If they adopt the educational program known as the flipped classroom model, in which teachers interact with students online, they might bring these students back into the local school system. Then they could get money from the state. Otherwise, these families are out of the loop -- no state subsidies. The local schools can't provide education for them if they are shut down because of the coronavirus.
Let them do a flipped classroom. The students are going to do vastly better. They're going to be in a safer environment: home. It will dramatically cut the cost of educating the students.
If the school districts know that a nonprofit foundation is going to provide the Chromebooks, and for one year provide the high-speed Internet access, the school district in the second year could provide the high-speed Internet access for $100 a student, and educate that student for about 30% of what it costs to educate a student in a brick-and-mortar environment. The teachers' union would be apoplectic, but school districts in the midst of this crisis would not care.
Whatever we can do to get students out of the brick-and-mortar environment of the modern classroom is going to further the cause of liberty. I would of course much rather have the school district sign up each student for the Ron Paul Curriculum. But I'm not a utopian. I will settle for the Khan Academy.
Once it became clear that the students involved in the flipped classroom that uses the Khan Academy are dramatically improving academically, then resistance to bringing in the Khan Academy for classroom-based students would be reduced. The cost of educating local students would go down. The student-teacher ratio could be increased to at least 30 to 1. There would also be lots of room to fire administrators.
What I am describing here is doable. This is not utopian. This would help designated students improve their academic performance. The students would be inner-city students, where expectations of school administrators are low. Any significant improvement in student performance would be proof of the legitimacy of a flipped classroom environment that uses the Khan Academy. It would lower educational costs. It would restore a degree of order in the lives of students. It would be a win-win situation for everybody except members of the teachers' union.
I have spent 60 years listening to conservatives offering plans to fix the public schools. Not one of these plans has ever come to fruition. The only thing that is working even marginally better are charter schools, but these schools are not run by conservatives.
I'm not trying to set up a system run by conservatives. I'm just trying to cut educational expenses and therefore property taxes. I'm also trying to improve the lives of inner-city students. Getting them out of the environment of local public schools is the most important thing society could do to improve the lives of these students.
CONCLUSION
This is not a utopian suggestion. This is a real-world suggestion that could be tested by a nonprofit foundation for about $2 million. If the test fails, that's not a lot of money lost. If the test shows the inner-city students can improve their performance by using homeschooling based on the Khan Academy, then there can be more tests. More tests would mean better lives for the students selected to be participants in the tests. The tests themselves would be beneficial.
I have not put this article behind a paywall. If you can think of anybody who might have influence with a nonprofit foundation that might be willing to test this, send him the link.