OK, time to destroy another hack…  “When you look at massive public spending areas, defense keeps us safe and health care keeps us alive, but it’s education alone that has the promise of a numeric return on a collective investment.”  Nope. Defense doesn’t keep us safe anymore; it is simply a policy tool for messing with other nations and creating jobs for the military-industrial complex. If defense keeps us safe, then why have the GRU/DHS? Health care does not keep us alive; all it does is kill our wallets, and eventually our health. Health care starts in the home with diet, hygiene, sanitation, and exercise, not in the ER or pharmacy. Education does not offer a return on a “collective investment” because it is no such thing as “collective investment” in the first place; public education is funded by theft and force, and the return is not one of the collective but of individual efforts, often in spite of a badly flawed and broken system. But for the purpose of this argument, we’ll assume that the author actually didn’t flunk basic civics and give him a pass on collectivist nonsense.  “As in, exactly what should we be investing in?”  We should be investing in our own children to get them the best preparation possible for adult life, and that is NOT accomplished within the structured rigors of a classroom environment because it has zero reflection on the real world. The real world doesn’t run on that system, period.  “This effort brought together an all-star lineup of education policy experts, who identified five policies that, if fully implemented, could each vault results into the top five (and if undertaken together, would surely take us to number one): teacher efficacy, universal pre-K, Common Core standards, blended learning (incorporating technology into how students are taught) and school leadership (training and empowering principals).”  OK, let’s look at these five, after disregarding the “education policy experts” as abstraction wonks because they lack the most important people in a child’s education, parents and the children themselves, who are not cogs in a machine.  However, none of these five address the ultimate question: how to better educate the kids. Instead these areas try to address how to more efficiently run the schools. Yes, the idea of better educating the kids may fall out of these, but only as a side effect, not *as the primary goal*. Therein lies the problem, along with trying to continue the mistake of top-down education, instead of what actually works, which is bottoms-up, from the local level. The issue is not what the schools need, but what the *kids* need.  Teacher efficacy: level of college graduation doesn’t mean much in a classroom environment. How big is the class size? What kind of class is it and at what level? What are the students’ aptitudes and attitudes? Can the teacher reach them to spark their creative juices and knowledge development *at their level*? That’s where the rubber hits the road, and simply trying to draw in higher graduates with more money (and how to pay for it? Hedge funds? Please be realistic!) misses the mark, because the best teachers are those that aren’t in it for the money but do it because they love the job and love working with kids. This solution ignores those X factors.  Universal pre-K: The premise is that kids arrive at K behind without pre-K, but it neglects to determine WHY that may be the case. They blame a lack of child care, but is pre-K supposed to replace parents in child care? The real problem is not a lack of pre-K but a lack of time to parent, and that goes back to family economics, which is why there is poverty, working poor, and multi-income families. That family economics includes tax policies, cost of living, work time, and every economic policy and regulation that hinders economic development in a family and nurturing their kids, and that extends beyond pre-K all the way through high school. Putting 4-year-olds in the school box doesn’t solve the problem. Helping parents be there for their kids does. In other words, let ‘s work to make pre-K an option and not a necessity by making the home part of education more productive. We do that by getting government off of people’s backs, making their paychecks go farther, and encouraging ways to not only allow parents to be there more for their kids, but to afford to do so as well.  School leadership: Yes, principals need economic training for budgets. No, they should not be the school’s HR department as that creates an inherent conflict of interest. Most importantly, they need to understand how to properly develop and implement policy that is constructive and sensible, not destructive nonsense like Zero Tolerance. Yes, they should lead the school, but that also means leading both students and teachers alike, not only one and not the other. It also means exercising simple common sense overall.  Blended learning: Using technology as a tool to assist in the learning process is absolutely great, but there is a danger attached to it, in that the teachers should not rely on it as a primary teaching tool. Nor should students allow them to do that. Technology is not the end-all-be-all, nor should it be. At the same time, technological prowess is a must to learn and it should be taught—but so should life skills like cooking, cleaning, balancing a checkbook, driving a car, working with basic tools, and most importantly, how to critically think and reason without a computer. Those involve both schools and parents.  Common Core: For starters, college is not and should not be for everyone, so it’s best to quit the nonsense of acting like it needs to be. That attitude devalues K-12 education and eventually Bachelor’s Degrees. Common Core has already been shown to be a running joke and it doesn’t work, because it makes a fundamental logical mistake in that one size doesn’t fit all, and centralized education doesn’t get the job done where local, decentralized solutions are called for. Second, it makes more sense to develop internships in skillset areas, emphasize more voc-tech and specialized schooling in lieu of college, and grow future workers and skills by partnerships with the industries that want and need them. There was a time when a high school diploma meant a decent job into a career, and now it is merely a stepping stone to the Bachelor’s Degree, which has replaced that HS diploma. That needs to change back to what it was, and it’s done by improving the education at the K-12 level so that alone should be enough to be self-subsistent as an adult. College should be an option, not a requirement.  How do I know all of this? I’m a parent with two STEM degrees, my wife has two STEM degrees, and we have seen the successes and failures of both public and private schools all of our lives, as well as hpw the interaction between teachers, kids, and parents needs to play out to educate the kids successfully.
Forbes challenged experts to single out five big ideas that could Make U.S. school kids
 tops in the world. Then we quantified The costs and
 benefits. Behold: an ROI-driven
 turnaround plan for our children (With a $225 Trillion Dividend).