(This post will concentrate on the humanities.  For the same ideas on the theme concerning math, though related, I will limit myself to once again calling attention to Jaime Escalante, who turned ‘poor’ Garfield High School into one of the top math schools in the nation–with very little money.  He got students to  1.value education and therefore   2. work hard.   These methods have fallen out of favor).

If you attempt to achieve a true result from a false premise you will almost literally bang your head against the wall.

If you were to watch Tiger Woods make an incredible shot (I know, I’m short on analogies, but sports are visual and not everyone knows Maradona) and conclude, ‘Hey, he made that shot because he has expensive golf clubs’, you would go out and get yourself some first rate golf clubs and proceed to make your lousy shots with them.  Even then, while not being the impetus behind the skilled shot, they help a bit–unlike books, which if readable offer no advantage intellectually by having a new cover.

If you look at the best educated people and think ‘Wow, they went to shiny new schools, THAT’S why they’re well- educated’ then you pour billions of dollars into shiny new classrooms (and, let’s say, shiny new techniques) (While, of course, ignoring the lives of people like Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Malcolm X, and hundreds of thousands of significant less-luminous others who got educated with little money).

That’s why whenever I see money poured into a school under the premise that it takes a lot of money to get educated or that it is the key to a ‘first-rate’ education I pad my walls.

The foundation of a solid education is a high reading level.  Really, it’s that simple.  Yes there are other factors, but as I tried to reason with the English department at my school a few years ago:

1.  You never see a low-achieving school with overall high reading levels

2.  You never see a high-achieving school with low reading levels.

Where should your emphasis be?

What do you need to attain high reading levels?

1.  Books

2.  Reading them, preferably from a very early age.

3.  A huge working vocabulary.  This will stem easily from the first two steps here if done right.

Books are anywhere from free (public library or school library) to .25 cents at the nearest used bookstore for access to the greatest minds the world has ever known.

Success in school is directly tied to reading levels, not money.

It does not take a lot of money to attain a high reading level.   Books are cheap.

You can’t pour money on someone’s head and make them educated.

As long as schools think that money is the key to education they will fail, because they are operating under the wrong premise.

The key to education is not money, but value.

Put a billion dollars into a low-achieving school and you might as well flush it if you don’t understand why it is low-achieving (if victim is anywhere in your thesis go ahead and flush it).

To spend your time reading to your children from a young age (and which is the greatest predictor of academic success, NOT how rich you are) you need to value that.

I did not grow up rich.  I guess lower middle class when it came to income.  I did have access to a ‘first-rate’ education which I will explain later.

There was one area where my mother never put any restraints:  how many books I could get at the book fair at school every year.  She did not have a lot of money;  she just chose to use it for books.  That’s called value.  Trips to the library.

If you want to see a school improve follow these steps:

1.  Arrange it that there is no disruption in classrooms

2.  Concentrate on High Reading Levels

3.  Realize that it is value, not money, that leads to a solid education.

This takes time.  It may take 12 years, to start with kindergarden and see the progress, because reading at high levels is difficult if you haven’t had the foundation.  You will have to work harder, unpopular as that may sound.  I guarantee no state that has won the race to the top can substitute anything for high reading levels and hard work.

The concepts are very simple.  They are being unnecessarily complicated.  Books.  Studying.  Hard work.

It’s that easy.