About a week before the deadline my good friend Beth Champion found out that Pupil Services failed to send her transcript and ACT score to Beloit College. She was left with a few days to fix the problem. A couple weeks later she found some of the papers Pupil Services was supposed to send out to another college didn't make it either but it was already too late. This has brought some interesting conversation at our lunch time discussion.
One day we were talking about what it would be like if the offices and the cafeteria had competition. Or if public schools as a whole had to compete for students? What would they do to make students go to them and not any other? Offices would have to be more careful when it comes to things like students' college applications. The lunch lines would have to work harder at making the food kids really like, and making enough, especially at reasonable prices. Teachers would have to make sure they're making their best effort at teaching to keep students in their classes. The schools would be more interested in what the students had to say. They would want to get more advice from them about what the budget should be spent on and what classes should be offered.
any thoughts?
5 comments:
I completely agree (obviously--I'm an example in it haha). I think schools would be more open to hearing student suggestions like block scheduling if we could simply transfer schools and they would lose funding. Lunches would probably be cheaper too...
This reminds me of something we were talking about in government. He said that within a few more years, Jeffereson will be building a new high school, and Fort is going to have to compete with Jefferson to attract more people. Fort needs to have something that makes people want to come here (good classes, facilities, sports teams, etc.), but if Jefferson has a comparatively better school, more people will enroll in Jefferson compared to Fort.
Excellent points! There is actually a small component (VERY small) in education that pushes for just this very thing. In fact, when school choice first came about, that's what was supposed to happen - bad schools were supposed to close.
(and you are perfectly able to transfer high schools in Wisconsin, in case you didn't know...)
Lack of competition creates ...well, not laziness, really. Maybe apathy is the better word. Like in communism - if you knew you were going to have food, an apartment & a vehicle, no matter what job you did or how well you did it, what incentive do you have to do more/better?
Me, I'm just that way - I hate getting bored. It's kind of like Dante's rings of hell for me if I have nothing to do. Sad, I know.
Great discussion!
This is a great idea that I've always thought about. Overall, one important idea I have learned over the past couple of years is that competition almost always leads to a better end product. Though in terms of school, I am not sure how it would work because the competition would depend on the students in the end. As we've learned in econ. thus far, incentive helps drive us all in various parts of society. Therefore, I do see a possible solution to your idea but I believe one would have to figure a way to make sure that all students are still getting the same standard of schooling.
I agree that competition almost always leads to success...but as to our conversation in Gov't about Jefferson, haha that I disagree on. Our school district has some of the best academic programs in our conference. Other schools nearby come to get advice from our school board. I don’t care if Jefferson builds a palace. I don’t think they can compete academically with us. We are far superior in that category to the majority of nearby schools. I wouldn’t want to attend any other school, in our conference at least. I believe we are quite spoiled!
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