There are times when the system is so entrenched and so lousy, incremental changes will never bring about improvements. Major structural changes are your only hope of improvement, painful as it is to do.

Speaking of entrenched and lousy, I just listened to a news story about the mayor of Los Angeles and his struggle to improve the LA Unified school system.

Forget the debate about intelligent design or sex education. The problem with public schools is the business structure of schools. If you dont change the structure of schools, the results will never change. And changing the structure will take a huge amount of political power because you will have to fight the teachers unions and the tax payers.

the problems

When looking at a system, I always start with the money. School budgets come from local property taxes. This system guarantees that poorer neighborhoods will get less money and thus poorer schools. Not only do poorer neighborhoods raise less tax money, they tend to have higher density and more kids. Imagine what the military would look like if each state funded their own private army.

The second problem are the teachers. Did you know that K-12 teachers get tenure? Tenure?!? Principals can be fired but teachers can never be fired. Teachers and principals know who the worst teachers are - there is just nothing they can do about it. Like any big system, there are terrific teachers and horrible teachers but because of tenure, it will always stay that way.

Beyond firing, there is not reward system for teachers that work harder or do more; salaries are based on seniority not merit. Some people want a test for "merit" or some national standard, but that will never work. Merit is something that cannot be defined but everyone knows when they see it. Think about your own job and you will agree that the people who best understand your merit are your boss and co-workers not some union official across the state.

the fix

Every child is a national resource. Every child, in every school should get the same amount of money for education. Period. Collect all the tax money at a federal level and then redistribute it evenly. We also need to keep a pile of money just for capital improvements. If that doesn't work as a per child thing, then we need a separate system for the buildings and parks, the libraries and computers.

But the same money for each child is not enough. In order to make real changes, we need to recognize that the wealthy need to support public schools again instead of building a massive private school system. We need national funding to level the playing field but we also need a mechanism that recognizes local communities.

Schools are forbidden from raising money on their own in many cities. We should relax this rule and let neighborhoods donate money to schools above and beyond the flat national rate. This local funding will create some inequity but it is consistent with our capitalist system and it will give the wealthy an incentive to stay in the public system. Even if some schools are still richer, the national system will raise the bottom and the poor will still be a million times better off than today.

Beyond funding we need to address school management and teachers.

Schools should be managed like non-profit businesses and to do that, we need to give the schools themselves the authority to have accountability. If you fire principals for doing a bad job but you never let them make any changes (the status quo), you arent doing anything beyond picking on principals. (Principals today have a thankless, lose-lose job.)

Give principals the ability to set salary and hire and fire their own staff, ie teacher. A "boss" without these two powers is not a boss at all. The school employees know who the dead wood is and everyone there also knows that the principal is powerless to do anything about it. Give principals the power and then you can hire and fire the best principals. Principals not teachers unions should run the schools.

Change the funding and change the powers of principals and we will see dramatic improvements in our schools. Do anything less and we will get more of the same.