At the suggestion of Acting President Matt Masten, a UES committee was formed during our last meeting to undertake an interesting and rather ambitious project. We plan to analyze the public education system currently in place for strengths and weaknesses, brainstorm hypotheses regarding how the system might be improved, and ultimately create a business proposal for a for-profit UES primary school that puts the rest to shame.
We agreed that the project should be composed of four phases:
- Vision
- Market Analysis
- Design & Costs
- Marketing
We then discussed several possible target markets:
- poorer, under-served communities in which our primary source of funding would be school vouchers
- corporate communities in which funding would come both from tuition and business sponsorship (eg. Silicon Valley)
- more affluent communities in which there is an (assumed) demand for higher-priced, higher-quality education
We tentatively settled on the second option, above. Upon deciding that our school will be located within the state of Florida, we discussed several possible sub-regions:
- Miami
- Tampa
- Orlando
- Jacksonville
- Naples
At this point we recognize that more research is needed to explore the types of school systems already in place in each of these areas before we’ll be able to reach a final decision on the location. Your contributions are certainly welcome and necessary if this project is to come to fruition, so have at it!
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A cursory google search turned up the following very basic data:
From www.psk12.com,
City (County) - HS score, elementary score (ranked according to elementary scores)
- Naples (Collier) - 1215.0, 1896.0
- Tampa (Hillsborough) - 1249.0, 1891.0
- Miami (Miami-Dade) - 1189.0, 1874.0
- Orlando (Orange) - 1213.0, 1872.0
- Jacksonville (Duval) - 1226.0, 1863.0
From www.greatschools.net,
City – number of public schools, number of private schools (ranked according to ratios)
- Miami – 248, 211 (.851)
- Jacksonville – 161, 127 (.789)
- Tampa – 156, 101 (.647)
- Orlando – 170, 86 (.506)
- Naples – 43, 19 (.442)
City (County) - avg. yrs. teaching, % with advanced degrees, student-to-teacher ratio, spending per pupil (ranked according to spending)
- STATE – 13, 35%, 16, $6,072
- Naples (Collier) – 11, 37%, 17, $6,992
- Miami (Miami-Dade) – 12, 44%, 17, $6,639
- Orlando (Orange) – 13, 31%, 16, $5,783
- Jacksonville (Duval) – 14, 29%, 16, $5,658
- Tampa (Hillsborough) – 11, 33%, 17, $5,519
This site seems like it has some interesting numbers. Been doing a little browsing: http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/
And I also think this material is totally on point with what we are doing: http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/06/01/frank — a restructuring of the way Introductory Economics is done. What we’re attempting is, of course, far broader and more significant a revolution than this, but we will still make use of this during the curriculum phase.