I give our education system an F. It fails the students in the interest of appeasing the politicians. It's an institution of passing standardized tests not one of learning.
Want to make education better? Warning: libertarian thinking ahead!
Step #1. Get rid of the damn federal guidelines. Seriously. Read about No Child Left Behind. Outta be called No School Left Standing. Check out how many highly paid administrative employees (people who don't actually teach anything) your local schools have to have in order to satisfy federal guidelines. My district was full of useless overpaid coordinators who were supposed to help enforce these rules, and they did mostly nothing but spin numbers and observe other people work.
Step #2. Once #1 is accomplished, do this at the state level: Get rid of standardized tests except perhaps as a "dipstick" type of measurement. Administer the tests at the beginning of the school year so teachers can get useful information from them or just get rid of them. Stop using multiple choice test scores as a punitive measure and the end all beat all of educational assessment. Anyone who's ever actually studied assessment (like say an educator!) knows the folly of this practice to begin with. You don't have to be a statistician to grasp the concept that filling in bubbles on a piece of paper is extremely limited in many ways as an instrument of gauging if the kid gets it or not. Make sure localities control their schools.
Step #3 and more. Get rid of supporting schools with taxes. Turn existing school systems into member owned cooperatives like utility companies. The basic idea here is that if your children are going to use these schools, you should pay for it, and you'd also control it like a shareholder in a corporation since members of a member owned cooperative can vote. Basically the way this works is you buy your membership in the school system for whatever rate they want to set (perhaps a monthly installment of so much or a fixed amount of money up front) and pay so long as you're a member of the cooperative.
The rate could be scaled to income with better off people paying more to offset a discount for people who don't earn quite as much, and civic minded persons and the like could be given tax incentives to foot the bill for these costs as well. Since this step eliminates property taxes and the like, people would have that much more money free anyway.
What you have then is a system where only people who use the service or else volunteer to support it (not all support would be financial, donating your time could off set operating costs for example) actually pay for it, and the system would still be owned by and accountable the public, but not controlled by politicians or regulations, and it would have to compete with private institutions on an open market for your dollar.
Furthermore I'd set up a merit based assessment system, a portfolio style review if you will, every so many years in the child's academic career. I mean a real assessment too, one that would consider all of the child's abilities, creative, physical, etc. The first eight grades or so, we'd be pretty generous and lax, but after that point things would get competitive. Someone with no merit whatsoever, and I mean the real losers, the bottom 5% that eats up 50% of the current school system's resources, would be given certification of what they'd done and they could go work for McDonald's or whoever and have a head start on their career. Hey, it's better to be the shift supervisor than the fry cook, and if you can get there 4 years earlier all the better. If they wanted to come back later and get more education, the onus would be on them to find the means, they already had their shot, and if it turns out they are worth investing some education in now that they see working at McDonald's sucks, they have the drive to find that means.
Candidates who proved they could excel at academic things just for example would be allowed to do so, and re evaluated each year or two (same for candidates who showed creative or vocational potential, etc.). If their family could pay, it would keep doing so. If they couldn't pay, same deal as before, the higher income people pay more to offset the cost to the lower income people, and civic minded entities could help out too, same as before. Completely merit based, whole way through.
Best part is, don't like my rules? Bring it up at the school board meeting, convince the cooperative members you're right, take a vote, bam, changed. Your kids all out of school now? You stop paying. The school turns around and sells your membership to someone else who needs it. You lose your voting privileges sure, but you don't have to pay out any more.
