Here is the good news for early childhood education funding from the US government, they are planning on spending a lot more money on it. Here is the bad news for early childhood education funding it’s coming from the US government. To put it in very simple plain english there are two sides to all this new funding for early childhood education programs the plus of course being that there will be more money available for programs that need it and the negative being that the funding for all of this is coming from the US government and they will be responsible for how the funds are being dispersed.
It’s a very sharp double edged sword this issue of the federal government funding more educational programs for our children. I mean on the one hand I think it’s great that there is all this focus on the importance of improving the education system in the US and the commitment of all these new funds. On the other hand part of the main reason why the education system is failing in the US is because of the public school systems in the US that are run by the government. So looking to them to improve a system that they help to put in place and is now failing our kids on a large scale leaves me wondering how they will make this new effort any better than the last.
Some opinions regarding some of the more dominant pieces of news regarding where all this new funding from the US government will be going to help the education process in the US school systems. Putting more money towards the charter school systems and enabling the states ease the restrictions on how many charter schools they can have in each district. I am all for providing options for schooling systems and competition normally breeds a better quality of services. Unfortunately I think that the US government funding a new school system when the public school system that is still in place has so many holes in it and could use that money to fix a lot of issues would be a better use for that money.
With regards to the idea of recognizing teachers who are excelling at their work with their student and giving them pay increases based on merit is long overdue. Merit pay for teachers to me is a no brainer of an idea that should have been made a standard system for teachers a long time ago. How they put a merit system in place is the big question of course and hopefully this is something that will involve feedback from all parties including the teachers unions.
Another idea that is being kicked around is the traditional time that is spent in the schools and reevaluating the traditional school year of September thru June. Either making the school days longer or making the school calendar year longer. I know that here in NC we have a traditional school system in place where the kids go to school from September to June. There is however an alternative “year round” school system here where the kids go for nine weeks starting in September then two weeks off and nine weeks on again. Then just a six week break in the summer and back on again. I would think that this type of scheduling would be more beneficial to the kids. I would tend to think that the that the retention levels of what the kids are learning would be better with smaller breaks. I think that a change to the time frame in which kids are attending school is a basic change that needs to be done across the board. It’s a fast paced world out there and our kids need every advantage we can give them and giving them a standard three month break in their most formidable years is no longer acceptable.
One of the main concerns with all this new “found funding” from the government is that it is coming from the government. Who’s to say that two years from now there is a new agenda that the government will need to address and they will need to start cutting back on other programs like all this promised funding for the retooling of our early childhood education system. Don’t get me wrong I am all for change and there is definitely a better way of doing things than the way they are now. Like a lot of us that live in the US we have a certain level of skepticism when it comes to programs and promises that come from the government.
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