At times, the rhetoric on both sides of the education debate can be disingenuous.

Florida has embarked on a path that, if taken to its logical conclusion, will result in a school voucher system which is something I believe in. Competition is good in providing the best product for the least amount of money.

Unfortunately, the school unions and administrators have not embraced the concept. They believe that only professionals should guide the education of our children. That has given us in Florida and nationally some of the most uneducated students in the world for the most dollars spent.

If the state were to truly devolve education from districts to individual schools, teachers and principals would have greater freedom to institute and try different programs. Parents would choose their children’s schools based on what they felt was important. This would require that the state stop mandating as much of what they do today.

Tallahassee would set the millage for local real estate taxes as they do now including the local amount. It would be collected by the counties and then remitted to the state. The state would distribute the tax money in the form of a voucher for each child.

Their entire role in education would be to set minimum standards for teachers and schools and then stay out of the way. Would this mean the end of local public schools? I don’t believe so. What it would mean is an end to the billions of dollars that districts siphon from schools for the bureaucracy’s support.

Transportation and other district-wide operations such as buses would be turned over to voluntary consortiums funded by the schools if they participated. I would also remove the mandatory security that is now required and leave it up to the school to decide the level needed if any.

One of the few mandatory rules I would have the state enforce would be every school must have a governing board that is composed of parents of the students attending. They would be the ones that choose the principal and oversee the curriculum. This would mean real choice and not what passes for it in many instances today.

Tallahassee would have to be disciplined enough to not intrude in education except for enforcing those minimum standards and making sure that the money was not being syphoned off by the boards and principals. Are schools and teachers any different than other professions that they should be more closely monitored? I don’t believe they are.

Teachers will be able to be paid commensurate with their skills just like professionals are in other sectors of the economy with schools now being more market driven. Instead of inflexible rules, teachers would bargain not only for pay and benefits but for the ability to determine the best way of instructing their students.

There are far too many outdated concepts that have not allowed our students to prosper. Stop playing politics with our kids.

We don’t need curriculum mandates from the capitol. We don’t need state bureaucrats telling individual schools what not to include as part of their material or what books to have in their libraries. Let the parents and teachers in every individual school decide. We keep hearing about freedom, but what we really have are too many politicians and bureaucrats making decision for parents and children.