The NY Times discusses the Federal Governments role in education. My favorite quote comes from the end of the article : “Since decades of research http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifmake it clear that what matters for evaluating employees or turning around schools is how well you do it — rather than whether you do it a certain way — it’s not surprising that well-intentioned demands for “bold” federal action on school improvement have a history of misfiring.”

Not surprisingly to those of us who are successful in life. We do better when we have a buy in to the system. That is why volunteer organizations charge you to be a part of them and Fraternities charge fees for friendship. If you have no personal buy in to the system you will just ignore it or at best put it low on your priority list.

The #1 reason public school is failing is because the government has told parents we don’t need your buy in to succeed. How do I know this? Ask any teacher about her parent conferences. The federal system takes decisions of education even farther away from the source. Thus crushing parental responsibility.

Beyond this list, the federal government is simply not well situated to make schools and teachers improve — no matter how much ambitious reformers wish it were otherwise. Under our system, dictates from Congress turn into gobbledygook as they travel from the Education Department to state education agencies and then to local school districts. Educators end up caught in a morass of prescriptions and prohibitions, bled of the initiative and energy that characterize effective schools.

College cost rise, but who can afford it?

The previous posted article from the NY Times, talked about the rising cost of education and why the federal government needs to give more money to it. I shortly discussed why the Feds involvement in education loans actually has caused this rise.
Of course we need college, because you make more money (almost $1 million more) and those w/ College Education are still at an unemployment rate of 4.4% nationwide (compared to around 9% average).

So isn’t a college education important? Yes, but why? Because we made it that way, can’t we remake it? What if we started to value internships more? What if we rethink education? We can make college less expensive if we want, but we can’t let the Federal Government and Large Businesses dictate what those are. The Occupy movement points out our problems, but they have the wrong solution.

Education Becomes More Valuable

The Index showed that 25.8 percent of households headed by a non-high school graduate faced major economic setbacks, compared to only 15.8 percent of households headed by someone with a college education.

Federal Programs caused the rise of college cost!

When did College Cost start to rise? If you look at History, you will see when we started Subsidizing College cost through the Federal Grants and Loans. We wanted to make it more affordable. Well if you are a business and you have more funds available – what do you do? You spend it! You are getting more money in, you are expected to offer a “better education” or at least more technology. This makes it even more expensive. So what happens? Cost Rise. They haven't offered a better education, just one that looks better on the outside.

The NY Times by Tamar Lewin has a different view from Secretary Duncan, but look at History and you will understand what I am saying.

Mr. Callan said. “We’ve put huge amounts into Pell grants under Clinton, Bush and Obama, but the money that went to financial aid has been absorbed by tuition increases. And with all that we’ve invested, we have a less affordable system than we had a decade ago. We’re on a national treadmill.”