nigelb wrote:I don't know about Texas but the public schools in this area are excellent. To what "national education system" are you referring? I always thought each state and indeed, each county pretty much contolled the schools within their jurisdiction. The teachers in this area are fairly well paid by national standards but don't earn anything like $100k even in their dreams! I think paying teachers a decent livable salary is a key to quality education in our schools. Seems to me that teachers are an important ingredient in our children's future and they ought to be paid accordingly. Test scores for students in Fairfax County (where I live) are consistently above the national average and have risen for several years in a row. A large portion of the county budget is devoted to the school system, which is recognized as one of the best in the US. In other words - you get what you pay for. School vouchers are not the answer to poor perfomance of schools, investing more in education is!
Apologies to all the Brits for boring you with US politics!
"Public Education" is the National Education System I refer to. The advent and continued operation of public schools is a federal law and controlled under the Department of Education. While administered and mostly funded at the County (and even local) level, many of the precepts and requirements are set at the State and Federal level in addition to quite a large sum of money being dispensed at the National level (remember "No Child Left Behind"?)
As for money, no, it's not the only answer. 3 Texas schools that were recently shutdown due to consistently failing grades on the exams that are given each year (teaching to the test doesn't always work no matter how much they want to tell you that it's the reason for "good" grades) were charging the maximum allowable in the state for property taxes, were receiving a good lump of funds from the State Lottery fund, and were arguably well funded as the teachers were well paid, the class sizes were small, and the buildings were kept in excellent repair and equipped with the latest in technology. But they still failed. Why did they fail? Because the teachers had no personal accountability for failing to teach the students. While the school was shutdown, the union ensured they had jobs elsewhere and ensured they were not directly punished for their failures. In fact, the TEA is setup where the system cannot determine specifically what teachers are the source of "failing" students so that they can be held accountable.
They have many of the same problems in Colorado, New York, California, and Florida for certain. Just because they're great in your area doesn't mean that they're good everywhere, especially when the "National Average" has been on the decline for the last 15 years and the US is steadily falling behind the rest of the world in those averages. More importantly, the rate of requiring remedial classes to be given to new college students has skyrocketed in the last 5 years so that now the majority of college freshmen have to take at least 1 remedial class when they enter college to make up for deficiencies from their previous 12 years of schooling which they "passed."
