A lot of people have opinions on what and how schools should teach, but there is no consensus. This education reform plan does not address what to teach or how to teach it, instead proposing how public education could be reorganized in order to to promote innovation and excellence by allowing meaningful competition among the school districts. The plan assumes that changes are being made to a public-education system similar to that currently in Texas. If your state’s system is significantly different, additional changes may be needed.
Since the earliest days of our species, education has involved indoctrination. Parents and grandparents repeated stories learned from their parents and grandparents, and in doing so passed their culture from one generation to another. When an adult makes the effort to teach something to a child, the lesson is always based on some doctrine. (Whether a doctrine is true, false, or uncertain, it is still a doctrine.) This is not necessarily bad. There are good reasons to teach our children about doctrines that have been successful in the past as well as those that seem promising for the future, but we need to realize that is what we are doing and understand why we are doing it. To think we can have education without indoctrination is unrealistic.
Conflict arises when people demand the right to dictate what doctrines are taught to other people’s children. Parents have a lot of influence over the lessons children learn at home, but little influence on what they learn from the community. Possibly the most important and controversial community element in a child’s life is school, an institution specifically designed for indoctrination wherein a typical child spends about 15,000 hours of his/her life.
Community elements such as movies, books, clubs, games, and TV are largely optional. Parents can direct children’s attention toward influences the parents approve of, and away from those they disapprove of. School is mandatory in most of the United States. The only practical, affordable choice for most parents in the United States is to send their kids to public school. Therefore, every interest group in the country wants their preferred doctrines to be the only ones taught in the public schools. Controversy is inevitable.
Because no two children are the same, every child can be considered a special-needs child, though some may have more specialized needs than others. Most schools in the United States teach large groups of students all the same thing at the same time in the same way, and do not address the needs of individual students except for the few that qualify for special education. One student may fall behind while another is bored and needs to move ahead, but the class must move on together. There are innovative ways to deal with this, but the current educational system discourages innovation.
My parents acquired excellent educations in schools where all ages were taught in the same classroom. By assisting younger children with their lessons, older children both reinforced their own learning and practiced leadership. Younger students learned from their elders not just academics but also behavior. Now most schools segregate students by age more for the convenience of the institution than for the benefit of the students. It is unclear whether this is for the best.
Responsibility for educating children falls naturally upon the parents. While I may have an interest in seeing how your children are educated, that does not give me the right to force you to educate them as I see fit. Even if I and several thousand other people agreed, none of us would have that right. Society is just a collection of people and can have no more rights than its individual members. Most parents are happy to allow others to educate their children, and that is fine, but parents should be allowed a meaningful choice in deciding who educates their children, and now they are not.
A parent who uses the school as a daycare may not be concerned whether the child’s time is being wasted. But a child is only young once. When a child is not actively learning we should at least allow them to play. Studies have shown that unstructured play time is very valuable for young minds.
Education is a business not unlike thousands of other service activities. If the government got out of the way kids would still get educated. However most Americans attended government schools and now have trouble imagining a world without government schools. That is okay because the “magic” of free enterprise arises from the freedom to take chances and bear the consequences. We can improve government schooling by increasing the ability and incentives for government-school administrations to take chances and bear the consequences.
This plan assumes most students will attend “public” schools controlled by local school districts. There are arguments for going to completely “private” schools, but this plan does not go that far.
The advantages of private over public enterprise arise mostly from competition. Private enterprises are forced to compete to survive, and those that become complacent tend to go out of business. When we find a private monopoly, we generally find it is protected or subsidized somehow by law. Public enterprises are generally protected from competition by laws, regulations, tax subsidies, etc. This applies also to government contractors, public/private partnerships, quasi-governmental organizations, and heavily-regulated private businesses. These protected enterprises tend to become complacent and inefficient, losing their customer focus.
This plan assumes private schools are allowed to continue to operate with few restrictions and that local districts may contract with or provide vouchers for private schools if the board believes it in the interest of the students of the district. The plan also assumes home schooling is allowed to continue and that districts may choose to offer services to home school students. As state subsidies to districts are based on minutes of instruction, the districts can obtain subsidies from the state for the minutes of instruction they provide to home school students and the minutes of instruction provided by private schools through contracts or vouchers.
One problem with school vouchers and charter schools is that they generally come with contracts or restrictions that make the private organization running the school into an agent of the government, reducing its ability to adapt to meet the needs of the children and partially shielding it from the beneficial effects of competition.
Therefore this plan focuses on bringing part of the benefits of competition to public schools by increasing competition between local school districts.
Competing School Districts
To derive benefit from competition, parents need meaningful, practical, alternatives, and need sufficient information to make informed choices between those alternatives. Right now, most parents have a practical choice of only one district and only one school for their children. Those that have a choice between schools usually find they are teaching the same curriculum in the same manner, which is not a meaningful choice.
To provide practical, meaningful competition this plan proposes to reduce the size of large school districts and allow the resulting small districts more freedom to experiment and to compete for students and accompanying state money. These districts will be adequately regulated without significant state or federal involvement as they will be answering both to school boards elected by the public and to parents choosing where to educate their children.
Smaller School Districts
The heart of this plan is the local school district. A larger number of school districts will provide parents with more choice as to where to send their children. Therefore all districts should have between 5000 and 25,000 residents. After each decennial census is reported, districts should be allowed 1 year to develop redistricting plans in cooperation with neighboring districts and submit those plans to the state school board. It is anticipated that most districts will submit compliant plans, but for districts that fail to submit compliant plans, the state school board will determine district boundaries. The new boundaries will take effect the 5th year following the census. With smaller districts, parents can choose to send students to a neighboring district if they are dissatisfied with their local district. Competition with neighboring districts will force schools to offer the best education they can, so not many parents will need to use this option.
More Flexibility for School Districts
Until recent decades, school districts had wide latitude in deciding how to run their schools. We need to restore that flexibility. The U.S. Department of Education has been totally ineffective; the department and all of its associated programs should be completely eliminated. Most state oversight of districts should be eliminated as well. The districts are supervised by popularly elected boards and are limited by the choices of parents, so they cannot get into too much mischief.
- States should allow individual districts to determine curriculum, choose books, determine qualifications of teachers, etc.
- There is no need for the state to provide or require accreditation.
- Curriculum should be published online so parents can see what is being taught.
- Allow districts to offer remote education to students anywhere in the state, with state education dollars flowing to the district that provides the education.
- Allow districts to operate schools outside of their district boundaries.
- Allow districts to jointly operate schools with other districts, to contract out operation of their schools to private organizations, and to offer vouchers for private schools as the board sees fit to meet the needs of the community.
- Districts must offer an appropriate education to all children within the district, subject to resource limitations. If this is not available in district, it may be provided by contracting with a school or other institution out of district. Appropriate is a subjective term that takes into account the abilities and needs of the individual student as determined on a case-by-case basis. Parents who cannot reach agreement with the school on what is appropriate may appeal to the local school board, then to the state school board. Cases still unresolved may be appealed in state court.
- Districts may accept out-of-district children and charge tuition for doing so. The tuition must be the same for all out-of-district students except those accepted under terms of a contract with another district.
- School districts may issue objective criteria identifying the children they are able to serve. The district may exclude out-of-district children who do not meet the criteria of their schools. Otherwise a district that chooses to accept out-of-district students must accept all out-of-district children on a first-come-first-served basis within the capacity of the schools after meeting all obligations to the children of their district and contract obligations to other districts. Issuing such criteria does not relieve the district from the responsibility to serve children within the district who do not meet the criteria.
- The state should pay the same for each student, regardless of the district where the student attends. The state may pay extra for special-education students. The state should make no other payments to districts beyond the per-student fees.
Schools Gone Wild!
If states give school districts all of this latitude, what is to prevent a school district from doing something completely crazy? First of all, there should be a few broad legal limits on what a school district must and may do, as discussed above. It is probably better that these limits be enforced through parent lawsuits and resulting case law rather than through a regulatory agency. Second, these districts will be governed by school boards elected by the citizens of the district. Third, most parents will have viable options to educate their children outside the district if they do not approve of the way the schools are being run. Parents who believe their child’s special needs are not being appropriately addressed within the resource constraints of the district may appeal to the state school board and then to the courts.
If we want school districts to innovate, we will need to allow them to innovate and take chances. Will some school district do something exceedingly stupid? Sure. You can count on it. But state and federal legislators and educational regulators do stupid stuff all the time. The damage from a stupid decision in a small local school district will necessarily be contained in scope and can be dealt with locally.
Parent Choice
Parents may send their kids to any public school they choose which will accept the child within the state, and state funding follows the child. The school must accept the child unless the child has special needs they cannot meet or the school is already at capacity. The school may charge tuition for out-of district students.
Scholarships
School districts must treat all students equitably, and therefore cannot offer scholarships or charge different out-of-district students different amounts of tuition. However, this does not prevent private third-parties from providing tuition scholarships on a non-equitable basis.
Local Funding
Currently school districts receive money through property taxes and sales taxes in addition to the funding they receive from the state. Districts with valuable commercial or industrial operations can raise a lot of money this way. But many children live in poorer residential districts with little business and little ability to raise funds through taxes. What is worse, many of the residents of these poorer districts have to commute to the wealthier districts to work or shop, so the already wealthy districts make money from the residents of the poorer ones.
For the state of Texas, I propose establishing school tax regions following the lines of the current TEA service regions, with all taxing authority to be transferred from the districts to the tax regions. Each district within the region would appoint one member of the regional school tax commission, which would have no authority beyond assessing and distributing taxes for the districts.
Employees and Assets
One issue with shifting school districts is what happens to the employees and assets of school districts when district lines are redrawn. This should be addressed in a general manner in the redistricting plans submitted to the state school board. The details will need to be addressed within the school districts. It is not uncommon for corporations to merge or demerge, with employees reassigned from one entity to another.
Preschool
Studies have shown little to no long-term benefit to children from having attended preschool. There is no reason for governmental involvement in preschool.
Higher Education
Most higher education in the U.S. is provided by state colleges, universities, and trade schools, which are government agencies. Most of the rest is provided by private non-profits that are government subsidized. While there is already quite a bit of competition among institutions of higher education, the government subsidies have reduced innovation and driven up costs in all institutions.
This plan does not address higher education, but our general direction should be to set higher education free from government controls and subsidies.
Posted 2021/07/09
FROM THE COMMENTS:
A reader points out that some counties don’t have 5000 people to meet my suggested minimum school-district size. The reader also points out that schools in rural areas may be too far apart for practical competition between districts. These are both good points. The plan could be adjusted to deal with the first. The second seems inherent in living in a remote area.
Readers suggest preferences for vouchers and/or home schooling. The plan allows districts to issue vouchers if that is what the local voters want. The plan allows home schooling.