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     Here's a plan that no one in power wants to consider: 

Get rid of the one-teacher-per-class-of-30 idea that has permeated 

public education for the last 100 years.

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In a world where kids sit, teachers present lessons, and parents are informed of the results a few times a year, it might be fine to have a ratio of 30 students to one teacher.

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In today’s world, that ratio is not workable, and the only ones saying it is are those who don’t have to actually perform the impossible: principals, district elites, education researchers, and politicians. The result is that we now mostly pay lip-service to the idea that we’re providing quality learning.

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Here's our plan:

• Arrange students in classrooms of 20 learners

• Assign three adults per classroom: 2 teachers and an aide.

• Place children in learning groups (e.g. classrooms) according to aptitude, motivation, achievement, and behavior.  Allow for fluid placement:  if a child achieves more rapidly than estimated, change his class.

• Diminish the need for documentation — the rationale for it was mostly to keep teachers honest about what they are doing, anyway.

• Install cameras in classrooms to monitor how teachers are working with children and how children are behaving. Discipline for improper behavior choices should be swift and concise. Kids who can’t or won’t learn in a general setting should be removed. Imagine how much better your child’s classroom could be if an adult came to the classroom to remove a misbehaving student based on the surveillance from a CCT! The teacher didn’t even have to stop teaching — someone just came because the cameras were being monitored.

• Make standardized tests count for the kids. At this point, the students, generally, don’t care while the teachers obsess continually over them.

• Abolish complex and arbitrary teacher evaluation schemes that require a lot of time, paperwork, and people power to administer. These schemes are a waste of money and only encourage corruption, among teachers and administrators. See my book for more on this.

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I know what you're thinking:

Where will the money come from to devote 3 adults to a group of 20 students?  

Redistribution of resources, that's where.

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When we eliminate the (usually high-paying) non-teaching positions necessary to administer the elaborate teacher evaluation schemes detailed in my book, we'll find most of that money. 

When we add in the funds recovered from eliminating wasteful programs that do nothing for learning, we find even more money. 

When we reform our school disciplinary systems to put the onus for good behavior back on the kids (using modern technology to help us minimize the "he said/she said" conundrum we now find ourselves in), we regain even more funds.  

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Schools should be in the business of educating children.  That's it.  But where we find ourselves,

currently, is that schools seems to be in the business of lining the pockets of people whose

thirst for money is eclipsed only by their ambitions for power and glory.

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Caught in the middle are the teachers, thousands of them, who want only to educate our nation's young but find themselves unwilling participants in the fraud and corruption hidden within our school systems.  For more realities of education, gleaned from my 27 years as a public school teacher, please see my many columns posted to Quora, the online question and answer forum.

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Education researchers have been trying to change how we deliver instruction and how we work with children for the last 40 years, at least. In our frenzy to enact meaningful change, however, we’ve forgotten to employ honesty about human nature: when we require people to do the impossible, they’ll figure out how to do the end-around instead.

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Impossible is impossible, after all.