What is wrong with schools is what is wrong with almost every organization and institution in our world. Schools, like all organizations, are ready for massive transformation, and with that transformation, we will build a better educated, more capable, and happy population. What do we need to do?
Update school environments
Far too many school environments are crumbling. Far too many schools have been left behind with regard to making those environments welcoming, modern, Earth friendly, and accommodating to modern teaching and learning practices. Schools should have flexible, modern, welcoming buildings and school yards. Every school should have gardens, play spaces, and multiple types of learning spaces that match the needs of students. Further, schools should be built to withstand climate change and in areas free of violence and pollution.
Make educator's jobs more reasonable
One reason school programs progress slowly is because educators' responsibilities have grown to be too intense. Many educators are working hours a day with multiple children and no time on task for planning, preparation, collaboration, and research. Few to no other jobs expect the professionals to spend their entire work days with face-to-face interaction leaving the three-to-eight hours of prep and planning for a person's personal time. We can make educators' jobs more reasonable by adding more front line staff to every school, and by front line, I mean staffing that has direct responsibility for teaching and caring for children and staff that is accountable for student success. Right now in schools, there is a layer of educators who rarely work with students and have little to no accountability for student success. In many cases, this educator group has a lot of power in a school system, but little accountability. I believe that this layer has to be diffused since it is more of an obstruction to good work in schools than a help.
Update school infrastructure
With regard to the layer of school staff that has little accountability or direct service, I believe that there is a lot of wasted time and energy that can be reallocated to direct service to students and families. For example, when I was an educator, I had about a dozen bosses, people with little to no direct responsibility for students and little to no accountability who spent their days sending me emails telling me what to do. Often these staff members were less informed than my hard working colleagues and less invested. When you are not dealing directly with students or families, it's easy to become distanced from the goals and to lose perspective and investment. It's easy to see why this layer of fat in school systems grows because the jobs are enviable--you don't have to take work home, no one is looking over your shoulder, and it's easy to make it look like you are working hard when you're not doing much at all. Also, when administrators hire these extra people, they can simply blame those people when the work goes wrong. This layer of fat in schools, to a large degree, prevents the good work and progress possible. There needs to be a few bosses or administrators in a school system, but not a huge layer of obstructive fat that does not serve students directly.
School finances
Many school districts misuse funds. Again, this has to do with the poor infrastructure that exists in most systems. One example is a time when I received a small grant to fund a field trip. The school administrator responsible for grants told me that it was too much trouble to process the grant, thus we lost the money. Often school finances are misused simply because old time infrastructure cannot handle modern ways of raising, using, and allocating money well. There needs to be change here.
In general, schools have not modernized to meet the world we live in. They need to change, and for starters they need to create modern learning environments, greater qualified teams of direct-service professionals, less fat with regard to bosses who do not have accountability and do not provide direct service to students/families, more reasonable expectations for educators leaving time for planning, prep, research, and collaboration during the school day, and better systems for dealing with school system finances. We can do that.