How should we educate our children today?
Education has evolved from the one-room schoolhouse to massive high schools with thousands of students.
We may think of our school districts as local entities that educate our kids to standards that reflect our communities. They are anything but that. As increasing mandates and directives have come down from Washington and Tallahassee, local control is a misnomer. Our school districts are nothing more than part of the education bureaucracy.
This bureaucracy is strangling innovation and choice. In the name of standards, we have seen the educational experience for most of our kids reduced to the lowest common denominator. Foreign languages and the arts have become almost nonexistent in many school districts. Teaching to a test has become more and more prevalent. Why is this so? Our children are less and less able to compete with their peers from around the world.
The time has come to allow parents and students to choose the education they think best. With the appointment of Richard Corcoran as Florida’s Education Commissioner, Governor DeSantis is signaling his intentions. During this administration, charter schools will play a bigger role. It is time to allow greater freedom in method and curriculum. The monolithic educational bureaucracy needs decentralization.
I am not calling for more educational power to devolve to the school district but, rather, to the schools themselves. For the past hundred years, the United States has tried to centralize the education of our children. It has all been done with the best intentions, but the results have not been good.
Individual schools controlled by the parents of the children that attend the schools needs to be where decisions are made. Both states and the federal government need to stop trying to micromanage how education is provided. The government’s prime responsibility should be to make sure equal educational opportunity is available to all by use of a voucher system and regulation of schools and teachers, similar to how the state regulates doctors and hospitals.
Some will say that poor children and those with special needs will be left behind. These children should receive additional voucher funds so that the services needed can be addressed. Different educational experiences will be offered by different schools. There is nothing inherently wrong with that concept.
Florida is moving away from the current bureaucratic morass. Both Corcoran and DeSantis believe in charter schools and vouchers. It is time to give parents more of an option in the education of their children. Instead, in the name of school safety, we are removing parents from inside our schools.
We have now completed nearly two decades of the 21st century. 19th and early 20th century models need to be updated to face today’s realities. Local control of education should be truly local by being concentrated at the individual school level…not in a school district, state capital or Washington.