The state of education

What do you guys think about the current state of education in the US (or your own country)? There are so many things going on nowadays like teacher's unions, teacher's evaluations, standardized tests, government funding, delinquency, charter vs public, tenure, etc. What do you think works and doesn't? Personally, I think the people that make the executive decisions have been removed from reality for too long to be relevant. For example, most college deans spend most of their in careers in academia and not in industry. They make decisions on what students "ought" to learn, yet don't have any insight on what skills are relevant first hand.

The US isn't so bad. Yeah, we're dropping in ranking but you can't just go by national averages. Our underprivileged students are actually improving on their scoring to the point they're doing better than the other countries ahead while those other countries' underprivileged students are dropping in test scores. The privileged students are scoring on par with the privileged students in other counties. So yeah, we could do better but it's not as bad as pundits and politicians are making it out to be. At least we're improving. Could probably improve more/faster if the government would stop slashing educational funding

I think there should be more options for alternative education. In Washington, there are a crap-ton of alternative schools, but they're severely under-funded and unmonitored. A lot of them are nothing more than slack-houses for delinquents. I went to an alternative high school, however, with truly dedicated teachers. They handled every student individually, and bent over backwards to give us the best education they possibly could. I went from a straight F nearly my entire school career to straight A, student council member, with college recommendations and my artwork in local galleries. If that kind of school could be used as a model, I think a lot of struggling students with problems, whether it's something like young parenthood, self-sufficiency, or learning disorders, would have a pretty good chance at a valuable education.

I think the reason why education gets cut is because it's a long-term investment. For example, even if a school gets more funding and instantly becomes a better school (realistically not possible), it's the next generation of students, not the current generation, that will show improvement. Politicians are bound by their terms, and tend to ignore issues that won't show results within their term. There's also the issue of an overpaid/unaccountable bureaucracy... A local college had a huge scandal where the dean had taken over $400k in personal expenses while slashing all departments due to supposed budget concerns.

Yeah, there was a case of a dean stealing funds for personal use down here a while ago. But you know, still even with the spending cuts at least kids k-12 are improving. I think that the lack of long term planning is a factor but to be fair, it's not just in the politicians. Our whole society is short sighted. And there's this strange change of tides where the parents get mad at teachers for their child not performing well. While yeah, you get some horrible teachers I don't think the majority are like that. And if the salaries were better, schools could probably be able to have more choice in hiring