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A Lot More For The Public Schools Produces A Lot Less Education.

A New Math Economics Approach to Getting Better Results from Pubic Education The Statistics Are All Over the Place. the More Money a Public School District Has Does Necessarily Create More Student Graduates Lex Loeb Contributor Network . One way to look at the study of economics is to see it as the analysis of incentives that get people and society working for the benefits of relatively scarce resources. Economics at best is the study of wealth creation verses poverty and the destruction of wealth. It is also the allocation of goods and services in the limited time frame of human existence. Economist have looked to see how to maximize wealth for the individual and the community with a variety of tools. One of the main reasons always given for manidtory public education is the economic value to society and the individual. In the United States we tend to see ourselves as a largely educated lot and attach significance of education to our economic success. Our schools seemingly don't have graduation percentage rates of enrolled students as high as they were in the past and in comparison with various foreign countries seen as potential competitors. Some school districts spend a disproportionate amount of money ramping up taxes and not graduating 40 percent or more of students in each class. The finger pointing blame gets political as anything does in America yet the ultimate solution is more money thown on top of the heap and worsening overall results on the incremental basis. Economists might say that there is proof of their law of diminishing returns with the unacceptable results. If economics is at base about the incentives that create productivity that helps society improve its over all conditions of wealth then that probably is the basic problem with our public and some private schools too. Students who are also children are not all suited to the accademic point of view that school is something to appreciate for the learning because it benefits society and growing knowlege benefits the student. Students like everyone else who is animal or human has a sense of direct consequence of taking actions and of getting some immediate satisfaction. Our schools tend to give a lot of immediate satisfaction and sense of active benefits to one class of people and not to others and that may be one big reason for the diminishing returns as gaged by over all graduation rates and test score results. Society seems more concerned about the economic welfare of teachers than they do of the students. The Myth that there are great and wonderful teachers that require higher and higher compensation for public service is not seemingly working. A dirty little secret of public education is that there is a definate difference in the quality of the overall population of student from one school and one district to another. An other secret is that some of the best performing schools and districts can and do have some of the worst imaginable teachers working there. Ideas persist that if only everything is made equal all will be better off but going back in time we find the same schools with lower over all pay and benefits to teachers and by some measures, less professional teachers, less trained teachers , larger classes in terms of number of students showed better overall achievement. To some it an absolute paradox to other observers the statistical pattern just don't justify the knee jerk reaction of adding more money to the heap every time the achievement levels drop. There is another way to fix the problem and that is to incentivize school not for the providers, who might these days just be online interactive computer programs or old fashioned text books without any teachers and that is to incentivize the students. Just saying that is being an instant political heritic. As many Republicans as Democrats seem to be believers that reducing class size and paying teachers for better results is the answer. The problem is that test scores and general achievement levels continue to slide. Some think that children are being diverted into a world of television and video games away from any interest in old fashioned learning and that is just yet an other excuse to prop up an obviously failing system. Incentivizing students is something we already see in some of our schools where youth gangs have taken over. People object to gangs and object to the incentives that keep gang members of their gang units. Generally there is a complete lack of understanding that young gang members are responding to incentivizing by the gangs themselves and otherwise most of these children would have absolutely no reason to become a member. Cliques have social incentives and gangs have that and other objective benefits of belonging to a group that has a group identity in some cases race. That is not the incentive to join any criminal gang but rather just a contributing factor. The real incentives can be monitary or the illusion of monitary value. .

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