> - allow schools to expel children Certainly public schools need to be able to remove disruptive students from the mainline process. > - mandate school and d

> - allow schools to expel children Certainly public schools need to be able to remove disruptive students from the mainline process. > - mandate school and district administrators to have experience teaching The overwhelming majority already do. It's a problem of misaligned incentives, though. > - ban homework and introduce periods of time during school when work is expected Homework should totally go away for elementary (I mean, other than a token project to ask someone questions once in awhile, etc) and be minimal for early middle school. At some point, though, you do need to put in some additional unsupervised work. > - remove all art and sports from school and reform them as independent free clubs to be participated in after or before school (unfortunately impossible in poorer districts) Actually, in poorer/urban districts, you're more likely to have providers like YMCA or charity sports leagues, around. It's the rich districts who are spending a whole lot of resources on nice extracurriculars for their students that are going to have trouble with this. > - increase teacher salary Yup. > - more separation of students by skill level (tons of research showing that kids learn better when they're placed in small groups at a similar skill level, also easily observed anecdotally.) This should also be accomplished by mixing ages. There's limits to this. Tracking math, etc, is useful. You might be able to do it with writing. But it may not make so much sense with literature or history classes, in that there is an actual body of knowledge to convey (of course, you can have honors classes if your student population is big enough). Also, I think you underestimate the amount of social power that comes with age. You can't throw together my 6th grader with 9th graders that are equivalently strong in math and expect a whole lot of useful educational strategies to still work. > - ban grades, introduce final exams in specific subjects at the end of school that can be retaken indefinitely (perhaps once per year). If you want to go to college, perform on these tests I think we need to de-emphasize grades, but grades are an important motivator and more immediate measure of performance. A lot of my courses are "easy A's" in the sense that most students get an A even though I cover rather challenging material and expect a lot: I get most students over the humps. But-- I still rely upon to some extent: - Being able to give assignment grades that are much lower so that students know they must improve - Students being motivated to improve so that their summative grade will be good, even when they're feeling a bit down about the course or their recent performance. > - industry must return to western countries to allow low- and medium-skilled people important labor jobs Comparative advantage is important.