My plan for saving Education.

This is my plan for saving the education system. It's doable, implementable, and financially attainable all on its own and it will save the US education system more than $13.5 Billion each and every year.

Whether at the state, province, regional or national levels, the outcry for finding a way to cut the cost and improve the quality of education in North America has never been more vocal and more profound than it is during the current economic crisis.

As always, bureaucrats threaten to cut back on teachers and textbooks instead of looking serious cost factors in the eye or to address key areas of mismanagement in the schools, boards, and education departments.

Sure it’s easy for me to be an armchair quarterback – anyone could challenge my credentials to jump into this debate. I have no kids, I’m not in school, I’m an adjunct professor but not currently teaching any classes – frankly, what could I contribute to the discussion?

The answer is “Quite a lot, really.”

One of the biggest complaints that schools have is the complaint of not having enough textbooks. California looked at having everything go electronic before remembering that one poorly timed rainstorm could destroy not only a laptop computer but a region’s ability to learn.

The reality is that textbooks today seem to cost a lot of money as they are selectively applied to different districts, so no savings seem to be generated by the scale of the markets involved. Plus, different schools have different wear/use/purchase cycles, so buying en masse doesn’t seem to work too well.

But wait a minute… is that really the problem?

No, it isn’t. The problem is that textbooks often cost over a hundred dollars per student per course and the material included does not necessarily address everything covered in that particular course. Often it does not even cover all of the core elements as outlined in the course curricula.

So if the textbooks don’t quite match exactly what we’re looking for, and they’re very expensive, it begs the question, “Can we handle this a better way?”

Suppose that we have staff in each of these boards and departments of education whose sole purpose is to develop and test curricula and teaching tools throughout the year. I know, crazy thought, but suppose that that was something that happened in these boards and departments of education – that we have qualified training and educational experts designing training and educational curricula and training materials; hey, it could happen.

So supposing this were true… Wouldn’t they have to know enough about the material they were working with to be fairly thoroughly knowledgeable about the subjects?

Would it be possible…I mean, just throwing it out there… possible, that *they* could be writing the textbooks? I mean, since they are also writing the curricula and training materials, is it really that big a leap to add in a few salaries for people to actually *write* the textbooks in-house so they include the material covered by the curricula and the curricula covers what’s actually in the textbooks?

OK, ok, I know. Radical thinking here. But how does that save us any money at all, you could ask?

Good question! I’m so glad you did! Now here comes the exciting part! We can have the textbooks printed through a print on demand publisher for $3-10 a book instead of the hundred+ dollars a book that most textbooks cost today. And! Get this… other education departments that want to cut some costs can literally eliminate hundreds of unnecessary curriculum developers and board/department staff by simply buying the materials (at a small surplus for the benefit of the department doing the work) and save both the cost of the textbook mark-ups AND the staffing costs!

But wait! There’s more! Oh, is this plan good or what???

20/20, various news shows, and numerous other witness anecdotal evidence sources have demonstrated that a large number (700 in one NY district alone) of staffers in some of these boards and departments are employees who have been removed from the classroom or other positions for, diplomatically speaking, a number of darned good reasons. And yet the boards and departments are legally unable to fire them and do not want them in the classrooms either, so they are paid full salaries to either not work or to make work.

Why not *put them* to work? Supervise their research and writing of curricula, textbooks, training materials, or other productive elements of the training and educational lifecycle and either they will save you money and do something useful or they will demonstrate their incompetence for the job, insubordination to authority, or other actually fireable offences.

Either way you win. You either stop paying for people who shouldn’t be in the industry or you get some work out of them before they drive us all bankrupt. The key is to supervise them thoroughly, but if you do that one thing, the rest of it actually works.

You save on unnecessary salaries. You save on the purchase price of textbooks. You gain productivity and save on salaries for people who shouldn’t be in the system to begin with…
If a state has 1 million students in it and they have even 3 courses a year for which we can save $90 each on textbooks per course then we can save each state in the Union an average of $270,000,000, or nationally that works out to more than $13.5 Billion (with a B), just in textbooks alone. *Guess at what the salary savings would be on top of that.* Go on, guess.
Suppose that over time we were able to convert upto 7 courses per student per year that way to print on demand published books designed, written and published by the board or the department of each state? We could save $30 Billion or more, right?


How many more teachers could we afford to put into classrooms? How many teachers’ aides? How much better will the quality of education be if it actually covers what the curriculum says it should in the first place? How much more, better, more useful material can be included for the price than we get out of traditional textbooks?

How easy is it to update it and come out with a new edition when it’s print on demand technology?

How easy is it to resolve the tricky classroom issues of copyrights of existing textbooks by having textbooks whose copyrights belonged to the board or the state?

How much more directly can the training materials reflect the needs of the classroom when they work directly with the teachers teaching from the work of their colleagues in the boards?

How great is it that we can finally find a way to either get rid of administrative deadwood or put it to work doing something useful for a change under direct active supervision?

My textbook plan isn’t a cure for all of the ills in the education system to be sure, but does it make any sense to look a gift horse in the mouth?