Some people say that the problem with education in Utah is that we're not spending enough. Let's look at that. Half of Utah's budget goes to education. As tax payers in Utah, we're spending over $7,000 per student per year on education. I'm picturing a 5th grade class of 30 students and $210,000 sitting on the table (30 students X $7000 each == $210,000). That's what we're paying to educate this class of 5th graders for one year. $210,000!! Where is it going? The average teacher in Utah only makes $40,000 per year? That leaves $170,000. The electric, gas, and water bill for one classroom only comes to a few thousand a year. And the building? I could go out today and lease a really nice school house for those students for one year for $15,000. Where's the remaining $150,000 going? We could buy laptop computers for each kid and still have $135,000 left-over! Instead parents are bogged down with book fees, fundraisers, and all kinds of other costs and teachers are under-paid. Private schools charge half that much but still manage to provide an excellent education for their students. How is that? We need transparency and accountability in our education system. As a business owner, if I have a department in my company that is not producing good results, we don't throw more money at it and hope for better results. We break it down and analyze it. We explore new ideas. Then, we identify a metric that we can use to measure performance and we test an idea to see if we can get positive results. If we do, we expand the test. Once an idea has been proven to be a success, we roll it out. We can take a similar approach to education.
A video interview with Dan was done on 3/31/10 in which he elaborated on innovative solutions to make Utah #1 in education. This is one clip:
There were several other Education related questions. Click here to see the entire interview: