How we educate our children has changed dramatically over the years.
The amount of new information that is produced is growing exponentially. How do you incorporate this expanding realm of knowledge into a curriculum? Or, should the school system even try to do so? One thing for certain is that the methods for instructing our kids are outmoded.
What is being taught, and how it is being taught, is determined not by teachers or schools but by bureaucrats and legislators. Mandates encompassing everything from classroom design to recess are institutionalized and codified in state capitals and Washington. Teaching to the test was not something I remember hearing when I was in school.
American education has become more and more bureaucratized while our children have become less and less competitive with their world peers. For example, in math the average U.S. student is one full year behind the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) average and 3.5 years behind an average student In Singapore. We also lag in science and reading with other OECD countries. Our educational system is demonstrably worse than other industrialized and first world countries.
Some people and educators claim that America’s averages are brought down by the number of foreign-born students; 23% of American students are either foreign born or have at least one parent that is. Canada, our neighbor, has 30% of its students that are either foreign born or have a parent that is. Canadian students consistently outperform U.S. students in academic rankings.
How do we improve the dismal state of our education system?
I don’t believe that the answer is to make more rules or have more tests. Doing exactly that has not remedied our academic standings and has made our kids fall further behind. There are 57 million primary and secondary students in the United States. Many would say that we should leave education to the local school board to manage. In 1950s America, that probably would have been a good idea. It no longer is today.
All levels of government need to get out of the education business. This may sound like a radical idea. It is in some respects but, given the state of American education and our future, it needs to happen. There is more than one way for a teacher to instruct and a student to learn. For nearly a century, we have attempted to homogenize educational instruction. That uniform method has not resulted in better educated students.
If the government is not in the business of education, that does not mean it does not regulate the business of education. The state should license teachers and schools much as they currently do doctors and hospitals. Through our taxes, government will be supplying the funds to be distributed to independent schools. Just as with healthcare or our legal system, government has a responsibility to make sure that society is protected from any scammers or unqualified educational practitioners. Our children’s education is vital to having a functioning society.
Government does not dictate what medicine a doctor prescribes, and it should not do so with curriculum. Parents will be forced to take a much more active role in the schools their children attend. For some children, there will be a necessity to have special schools, but these too can be handled in the same way with more government oversight and a larger voucher payment.
The literally hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars currently spent on administrators, coordinators and bureaucracy can be better spent in individual schools. Parents will pick the educational institution best suited to the child instead of forcing the child to conform to one standard irrespective of the child’s abilities. What I am proposing is to dismantle an educational monopoly and bureaucracy that no longer serves American children. The current system does not educate our children in the manner they need to compete on the world stage.
This would remove the expensive middlemen and bureaucracy that are individual school districts. What I am proposing are non-profit, independent, charter schools that are licensed by the state. The schools should be individually functioning institutions operated by independent boards. The boards must be made up of local citizens with a majority of members being parents of students attending the school. By that requirement, schools will continue to be parent-centric and not become dominated by corporations. As non-profit corporations, they will not be profit generating. One must look at them as we do other local charitable organizations in our communities.
While this proposal privatizes education and allows for much more diversity in curriculum and pedagogic methods, it does not take government completely out of the picture. They are still the funder through tax dollars and, therefore, need to have oversight authority as they currently do with other regulated entities such as nursing homes, hospitals, and private universities. Teachers and principals would be regulated much as government now does with lawyers, doctors and insurance brokers, ensuring they meet minimum qualifications.
Each year, our children become less able to compete in the world. We have tried “big education” with government at all levels becoming more and more involved with less and less success.
In the past few years, I have been involved as a board member with the Center for Constitutional Values. I have seen just how smart and accomplished some of our Martin County kids are. But not all our kids thrive in their current academic environment. Unfortunately, those children are the majority of our kids. They are not living up to their potential. How about we try something to give them a chance to do so?
