> Reduce school hours that are very often lengthened for babysitting reasons.
This babysitting is vital for many families, most of whom are low income and can’t afford alternatives. If we reduce class hours we should provide something to keep children positively occupied.
Personally my parents just made me walk around, though ;)
That said, I'm curious as to what age this care would be required? Back In My Day ™ I was entrusted with a house key at a relatively young age (10? 11? it was a while ago...) and would walk myself home / prepare food / generally take care of myself until an adult came home. But these days you hear about police being called for kids playing without an adult present in a fenced-in front yard (and the fact that as I understand the USA is far less walkable than where I live) which makes me wonder what age is considered suitable over there?
And often the vast majority of the money in sports is concentrated towards a very small fraction of the student population, often for regional pride above their self-actualisation. A lot of high school athletes are quite miserable or do it out of social pressure.
I'm not saying we need less sports, we can just do it with less money that is better allocated.
You can reduce class sizes by hiring more teachers. Their salaries aren't actually a huge fraction of education spending (only around ~15% if you assume one teacher for every 30 fulltime students and 80k TC per fulltime teacher, both of which are deliberate overestimates).
Hire 30% more teachers, give them a 30% pay bump, and reduce unneeded spending such as excessive sports spending beyond what is useful to the students. Remove unnecessary administrative load from the teachers. Reduce school hours that are very often lengthened for babysitting reasons.
You can even cut the last year of education and tack it into community college while making it optional.