Fix the Public Schools

There is certain knowledge that every American should possess. The problem is that no group of policy makers has been able to determine what this knowledge is. As a result, new teachers walk into a classroom and are told to "teach the frameworks." We are left with little to no materials and have to invent our own curriculum, trying at the same time to relate these to the muddled mess that are our district/state's frameworks.

This system is broken. Here is a way to fix it (IMO).

1. Teachers need a curriculum. Tell new teachers what skills they must teach and give them lesson plans that earlier teachers have used. More teachers would stick around for a second year if they did not spend 30 hours a week making lesson plans from scratch.
2. Have a national teacher lesson plan website. I should be able to go on the Internet and find ten different units on teaching subject verb agreement. Instead I have to sift through three or four teacher sites to find a worksheet here, a fifty-minute lesson plan there. Teachers need to share information. Notice I am not talking about a one-day lesson plan either: I think new teachers should be able to look for entire units that they can teach on everything from sentence completeness to figurative language.
3. When a teacher leaves a position at the end of the school year, they should be required to write a letter addressed to the next person to teach that course. In that letter would be units taught, a list of materials used, and advice for successful ways to teach that course. This was a requirement at a summer school program I worked at, and it was helpful to know that someone before me had taught this class. Teachers all have the same mission: make our students smarter. We must be willing to share information/materials to do this.
4. ACT/SAT materials should be made more accessible to poor students. I would love to buy a study guide for all my students, or better yet send them to tutoring sessions like rich parents can do. That's not an option though. Level the playing field by making materials available to ALL teachers interested in helping their students achieve success on this important tests.

There are more things we can do to fix public schools: they are not irreparable by any stretch. These are a few simple things I think could go a long way in making public school teachers and students more successful.