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Todd started the discussion with his post about reforming education in America and Tracy added her two cents. Tracy agreed with me about the less-than-impressive track record of charter schools, but both thought market-style competition were the solution.

I disagree that bringing up charter school problems is a pot shot, since charter schools are exactly what many reformers and proponents of privatizing public education want. My main point is not that I think privatization is morally wrong or doomed to failure, but that we should take a more scientific approach to charter schools, vouchers, and other forms of privatization.

Here are five slow, difficult steps for reforming education in America.

1) We should try more than one alternative model. A lot of people are big on for-profit companies running schools with public money—why not non-profit organizations instead? We have some evidence it works, since many private schools and colleges are non-profits. Looking at colleges, the non-profit model has apparently been more successful than the for-profit one. Why don't we try just privatizing some aspects of school systems, like facilities? Many large corporations outsource their maintenance work. How many advocates for “choice� and “freedom� are willing to try charter schools run directly by teacher's unions?

2) We should make reforms systematically such that results can be compared in some meaningful way. If we privatize the cafeteria in a middle-class suburb and costs go down, we cannot conclude that private charter schools will be effective and save taxpayers money. If we have a successful charter school in a wealthy suburb we cannot conclude the same model will work in the inner city. We need to be able to get comparable metrics in order to make comparisons.

3) When trying to reform school systems, raise test scores, or otherwise improve education, we should base our attempts on some kind of actual research, not just ideology. For example, are we even reforming in the right place? Let's see a cost/benefit analysis - where can changes make the largest difference? Programs like Raising a Reader and First Book have followed the numbers pointing to early childhood literacy intervention. From this FastCompnay profile of JumpStart:

By kindergarten, on average, a child from a middle-income background has received up to 1,700 hours of one-to-one reading time while a child from a low-income background has received only 25. As a result, at first grade, the middle income child will have a vocabulary that is four times greater than his low-income peers. Since a child's knowledge of the alphabet in kindergarten is the strongest predictor of reading ability in 10 grade, this discrepancy is telling.

4) We should learn some lessons from the current experiments with charter schools and other approaches and do better. I think it might be worth looking into increasing oversight of these schools and investigating the role political connections and campaign contributions play in how contracts are awarded. There's strong evidence that charter schools affiliated with a district are much better than completely independent schools. This is not just about finding bad news. What are some school doing right?

5) More pizza parties. I'm only half kidding here. How often have we heard that “throwing money at the problem� isn't a solution? Granted I haven't done a lot of research, but I don't think there have been many cases where too much money was given to a school system. Let's add this to our list of alternatives to try: spending a ton of money on a poor school district to improve the building, the materials, the library, the competitiveness of teacher salaries, the nutrition of the food, the before- and after-school programs and activities, etc.

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Read Tod's post and Jason's comment before you read this, please. Jason, your complaint is not unique to schooling. Any time marketing exists it exists in a world in which consumer is not educated; in fact, they are counting on it. Thus we have things like McDonald's. At the same time market pressure is the most responsive and pliable type of reform initiative. For instance, for the exactly two point three seconds that everyone remembered (a la non-research based docu-drivel) just how disgusting McDonald's food really is they drastically changed their menus. That was nation-wide; hundreds of thousands of store almost over night all because of a little market pressure. Show me a neighborhood that has any consumer educated enough to make a "rational" decision about what to friggin eat for lunch and I'll show the Garden of Freaking Eden. Jason took a pot shot at charter schools and it's true that as a class they suck. However, it has been proven, in economics and biology that without competetion weakness sets in. Charter schools provide much needed competition to bolster the otherwise festering public schools. If you don't believe me, just take a close look at the Dayton Public School system. They aren't perfect, far from it, and many of the charter schools around are just downright scary; but DPS has improved leaps and bounds since the rise of charter schools in the area. The truth is, the only good thing this country has as a true instrument of change in capitalism, capitalism, capitalism. If that means that some kids end up at the McDonald's of education I'm all for it. Because I gotta tell you, as a former insider on both sides of the desk, the system we've got right now is deeply infected and is suffering. It could be that a hard shot of consumer choice would be enough to shock it into health and I'm inclinded to believe it.

1. Blow up the Department of Education. 2. Eradicate the teachers' unions by hiring Pinkertons. 3. Abolish government control over running schools and place most of the governance and day-to-day operations in private hands. 4. Create a comprehensive school choice voucher system funded by the States. 5. More pizza parties.

Fellow interneters, imagine with me if you will: You are in a group, either that you know or you don't, it doesn't matter. The subject turns from something innocent about the upcoming elections to, dare I say it, sex. Not just 'hey, that's sexy' but 'oh my god, there is sex everywhere and my/someone's children could possibly hear about where babies really come from and now I am super offended'. Now, everyone is in a giant debate over their personal views of sex. Some are offended and leave, some yell and scream and don't listen to what anyone else has to say, and some never get their point across. . So, now you have this visual. Someone please tell me why it's such a hot topic? Personally, I think that we are way to hung up on it. We can't have our children finding out about sex! It's immoral. It's disgusting and dirty and better just not to think about. The question I pose to you is: Why are we still like this? If we just taught our children about sex, then it wouldn't be a big deal. I know it's cliche but knowledge is power. I feel like we shelter our children from way to much. Bike helmet obsessions, not allowing children to play outside alone, fear of generally everything and an overwhelming fear of our children seeing a naked breast, or godforbid, a penis; when are we going to stop bubble wrapping our children? Americans are afraid of sex. Why is that? Why is America so hung up on it's own fear of sexuality that we have to persecute Janet Jackson for a slip of a pasty covered nipple at the Superbowl for years to come? Why is that more important then any other topic, just about? If you want to have the American public's attention turned away from important matters, why just say something that involves children and sex. That'll start some new fires and leave your fraud/political mishap/whatever bad thing you were doing to die in peace with out the American public even knowing it was there. American priorities are in shambles. Who cares if there is nudity? Some people used to think that the human body was beautiful, not shameful. When did my vagina become shameful? Why are we teaching our children to fear their own bodies? It's not just Hollywood that teachs girls to hate their own bodies. It starts with their own mothers and fathers telling them about that special private area, you know, the one that's dirty and ugly and never to be looked at much less touched unnesessarily. Hmm... And so, this overwhelming fear of our own sexuality is spread like an insecure disease to our children in an unending cycle of self hatred and obsessive insecurity with the topic of sex or sexuality. How can we change this?