Pre-K to infinity.
1. Pay and train teachers at prestige levels
2. Include career educators in all policy reform conversations and decisions
3. End poverty, mothertruckers
3. a. Studies have shown that if you give poor people money, they will spend it on food, shelter, shoes that fit, and more food. Health care services. If they have kids, they will probably buy for their kids first and most.
3. b. Money from where? Tax loopholes. Punitive liens on corporate robberthieves who wrought economic destruction through racist real estate and banking policies. And wage theft. A cap on CEO pay.
Serious Robin Hood legal shits.
I’m not picky about how it happens. But the money exists. In the caymans or wherever.
4. Watch as kids, no longer fretting about the various traumas of poverty, are now capable of paying attention to their teachers. Teachers who won’t burn out or check out (or, if academics, get squeezed out) because they get moneys and respects.
No ridiculous, teacher-punishing, reductive-evaluation-quantifying reforms necessary.
5. You’re welcome.
Thinker For Hire 
I wrote a long comment about the pragmatic difficulties associated with this, and how it would require drastic overhaul of multiple systems – welfare, taxation, how schools are funded – and then I realized, duh, you are advocating a total overhaul of those systems. And hey, we’ve been trying incremental changes for years, and where has that gotten us? So I get it, totally!
And now I’ll get back to my job of trying to incrementally change things. By providing more higher paying jobs, by encouraging industry and corporations to move to my poor city, so that our low skilled residents can get good union jobs and provide for their families and get out of the welfare trap (where you are not exactly incentivized to work if jobs are shit and have no benefits and getting one means you lose your welfare check and your free health care – I mean, it’s not laziness that is the problem there, it’s a fucked up system that punishes you for working!) and also invest back in the community, buying houses and products and services and trying to rebuild the community from the ground up. And tax revenues will increase, and they will go to the schools, and people will invest more in their schools and their kids, and they will want to vote for school bond measures, and education will improve.
And you can see why I wouldn’t want to overly tax those industries wanting to move in. And why, although we want them to be environmentally sustainable industries and corporations, we can’t afford not to make some compromises. Because it’s also life or death to the economic vitality of a town like this. And corporations know that full well.
And if we are successful, a ghetto could open up in our neighboring city and people will holler about “gentrification” and how we screwed them over. And they will be right.
This shit is complex. Sigh. Maybe we do need a radical restructuring, although then I’d be out of a job, so …
Yes. Thanks for this! The only ways we can change anything are partial and compromised. Incremental. I’d just love to see teaching treated as a profession, rather than a service. Where teachers are rewarded for experience as well as success, where actual research is involved in evaluating their impact on students. But that alone would require a massive overhaul of many systems. Even that: pay teachers better, please. Even that seeming small step would involve shifting around so many continents of entrenched systems.
Thanks for all your good work on those small, compromised steps forward!
[…] I already said how. […]
We need more Eisenhower Republicans.