It is school board election season again. I have run a number of times in the past but have become tired of bugging people for signatures. I would like to do what I can now to stimulate a discussion of education ideas and put forward some of my own.

We should gradually reform tenure by limiting salary increases on the tenured portion of peoples positions. For example, offer extra stipends for exceeding class size thresholds or shorten the workday and then add a period that is not guaranteed by the person’s tenure. This would make it possible to shift workloads from people higher on the pay scale to those lower on the pay scale rather than lay off people of lesser seniority.

There should be an affirmative effort to develop remote learning. We should continue to develop summer programs with remote learning courses that students can take from home. I believe it should be possible for teachers to banish disruptive students from their classrooms to remote learning in or out of school. When teachers exercise the option of remote learning, they should expect to have their classes recorded. The availability of a recording would be of great pedagogical value and was often not made available during the pandemic remote-learning hiatus, which I consider a kind of sabotage. There should be made available remote-learning electives for students, particularly in courses of low enrollment. There could be a teacher in one school teaching students in multiple schools. I believe the future of higher education could well be with remote learning so we should prepare them. I can easily imagine a free remote-learning university established at the national level with both live and artificial intelligence professors capable of educating billions of people. There will no doubt be a Luddite resistance to this on the part of existing institutions, but it will help to control costs in higher education to have this competition.

Francis M. Gurgui

Napanoch