Education Matters US

• provide a standards-based instructional program in math, reading, social studies, fine arts, science, writing and other areas specified by ISBE. All schools must also teach: good nutrition; CPR; first-aid; drug/alcohol/tobacco abuse prevention; civic responsibility; sex education; bicycle/pedestrian/bus safety; daily physical fitness; consumer education; humanness and individual responsibility; good health care and AIDS prevention; driver training; principles of free enterprise; manners and etiquette; vocational training; economic awareness; Holocaust history/Black history/Women’s history; management of money, property and resources; and pride in work.

In addition, Illinois Public Schools must also:

• Give specialized instruction for the hard of hearing, the blind, and the neurologically impaired in the “least restrictive environment”.
• Teach gifted students
• Conduct eye testing
• Give inoculations
• Provide pregnancy counseling
• Instill morals, ethics, and values while avoiding any mention of religion
• Search for and exclude all items defined as weapons
• Help students develop political awareness and know-how
• Dispense surplus milk and other commodities
• Perform job placement, provide career information and develop work skills
• Provide counseling and psychological services for grief and conflict assistance
• Assist with bilingual language development and assistance in translation for non-English speaking students
• Counsel delinquents
• Provide transportation
• Follow due process
• Protect student privacy
• Provide computer literacy
• Eliminate sexual discrimination and harassment for students and staff
• Prohibit smoking anywhere on school grounds
• Assist in bladder control
• Develop the ability to reason
• Provide suicide counseling
• Maintain birth information and age certification data
• Close school for selected ethnic and national holidays
• Maintain often extremely costly programs to manage or remove asbestos, lead and pesticides – including notices to the community.
• Foster integration
• Ensure civil rights and racial tolerance
• Detect and report child abuse
• Eradicate head lice, scabies and other diseases
• Assist in charity fundraising
• Serve hot lunch and breakfast
• Develop an appreciation of other people and cultures
• Build patriotism and loyalty to the ideals of democracy
• Build respect for the worth and dignity of the individual
• Involve parents in the creation and review of student discipline policies
• Promote an understanding of the heritage of our country
• Train all staff and provide protection from blood-borne diseases
• Provide individual tutors for students who are hospitalized or recovering at home
• Abide by conflicting state and federal accounting standards
• Develop curiosity and a thirst for learning
• Develop skills in the use of leisure time
• Build a feeling of self-worth or self-respect
• Meet all life safety code provision for school facilities
• Retain student records for 60 years
• Administer ISAT and IGAP tests in accordance with ever-changing rules
• Account to the penny for the spending of federal funds
• Pay for criminal background investigations for all staff

It cost us twice as much to get a poorer result than we did 20 years previously with much less money. So we decided to rethink what we were doing here as well. The first thing we did was to identify where the dollars were going that we were pouring into education. We hired international consultants (because we didn’t trust our own departments to do it), and they reported that for every dollar we were spending on education, 70 cents was being swallowed up by administration. Once we heard this, we immediately eliminated all of the Boards of Education in the country. Every single school came under the control of a board of trustees elected by the parents of the children at that school, and by nobody else. We gave schools a block of money based on the number of students that went to them, with no strings attached. At the same time, we told the parents that they had an absolute right to choose where their children would go to school. It is absolutely obnoxious to me that anybody would tell parents that they must send their children to a bad school. We converted 4,500 schools to this new system all on the same day.

But we went even further: We made it possible for privately owned schools to be funded in exactly the same way as publicly owned schools, giving parents the ability to spend their education dollars wherever they chose. Again, everybody predicted that there would be a major exodus of students from the public to the private schools, because the private schools showed an academic advantage of 14 to 15 percent. It didn’t happen, however, because the differential between schools disappeared in about 18-24 months. Why? Because all of a sudden teachers realized that if they lost their students, they would lose their funding; and if they lost their funding, they would lose their jobs. Eighty-five percent of our students went to public schools at the beginning of this process. That fell to only about 84 percent over the first year or so of our reforms. But three years later, 87 percent of the students were going to public schools. More importantly, we moved from being about 14 or 15 percent below our international peers to being about 14 or 15 percent above our international peers in terms of educational attainment.