Jay Mathews offers seven ways to fix one particularly disfunctional high school in the District of Columbia, collected from suggestions he received from readers.

Most of the items on the list, however, could apply to high schools in many other locations.

1. Train teachers better.

For the money, that would be the absolute best investment for improving, not only high schools, but public education in general.

2. Let principals hire and fire staff.

This assumes that you’ve hired competent administrators in the first place. Not always a given.

3. Remove disruptive students.

Very easy to say but what do you do with them after that? Too many people, inside and outside of education, support this idea without bothering with the follow through. How about offering solid vocational training instead of just piling on more AP classes?

4. Make high schools smaller.

To some degree, yes. However, the “small schools” experiments funded by the Gates Foundation and others, have produced mixed results at best so this is not a given either.

5. Get parents more involved.
7. Involve the community.

Both great ideas. How?

6. Make the building look nice.

Also good. It’s pretty well established that a good working environment is fundamental to producing good work. But this takes money that the public doesn’t like to spend.

Of course, missing from this list is the complete alteration to the structure of teaching and learning.

We need classrooms in which we abandon the assembly-line model currently in use in most schools and where we implement a curriculum more appropriate to the world the students will be living in.

Without that, none of the rest of these ideas will result in meaningful improvement in this high school or any other.