School choice is a big deal for our new president, our soon-to-be Secretary of Education, millions of parents and students, and for teachers’ unions. Three out of these four favor it. The process of expanding school choice and the effects of it are the basis, potentially, of a learning revolution.
“You’re destroying public education,” say public-school educators.

Charter Schools are a hot topic and part of the revolution. Politicians take strong positions on both sides of the issue. Some like to defend “allowing” more charter schools in urban school districts; others, mindful of union support, insist on defending “our public schools,” as if charter schools weren’t “public.” They are public schools, but they aren’t unionized, for the most part, and they can set many of their own policies, work rules… and inspirations.

Public schools have been saddled with tasks that do not improve learning. This has happened in fulfillment of social-engineering intentions, “political correctness,” whatever that happens to be this year, and in reaction to fairly poor management, generally. There is little accountability under unionization, particularly when most middle-level school managers are in the same teachers’ unions.

America has tried to “fix” education… we can give some credit for that, but the fixes are bureaucratic and government-growing, and have yielded spotty improvements. And, they’re damned expensive. In general, learning problems concentrate in “poor” school districts, and these concentrate in urban areas. Simply busing children around to “mix” them with richer kids in richer districts has some individual success, but it reaches very few.

There’s no news about school districts EVER recommending that less money should be spent because they have learned that a lot of it has no value to education.

School budgets start with staffing classrooms and balloon to provide disproportionate numbers of administrative personnel. In the mid-1980’s the Brookings Institution completed a survey of public school districts nationwide. Across every demographic stratum, they found, test scores and other grade performance metrics were lower in inverse proportion to the number of administrative personnel.

Another way to look at that result is to say that in school districts where higher proportions of personnel funds were spent on teachers, students did better. Too many highly energized, highly motivated teachers are ground into robots by having to explain what they intend to do, describing what they are doing and reporting on what they did.

Too many, who never were highly motivated, are protected by unionized tenure, sometimes reporting to lounges to do what they wish because no principal wants them – still paid as if one did. Will more money correct that?

Although the premise of the public complex says that now that we have calcified all of this waste and misspending, more money will make things better from this point forward, little evidence exists to show that it does.

Charter schools, by and large, have few administrators and are non-unionized. Their teachers may be fired if they don’t teach with zeal and initiative and love. The schools, themselves, will go out of business when they screw up, fail to educate or mis-spend their budgets. Public schools never close due to failures like these – they get more money… and administrators.

Choice is what makes freedom work… Free Will: the essence of our Judeo-Christian ethics and heritage. “Thou mayest choose from evil.” We can choose to accept the responsibilities of freedom… of our choices. Or we can choose foolishness, crime, irresponsibility… socialism, in effect, not to be confused with humanity or even humanitarianism.

We can choose what is best for ourselves, and still be responsible. We can choose to marry and be a parent and a dedicated spouse, and thereby to raise our children and choose their educations in fulfillment of our philosophies and responsibilities.

We are not obligated, except by the public school monopolies, to turn our children over to different philosophies and relinquish our responsibilities. We can choose – or should be able to in a free society of sovereign citizens – to direct our children along the responsible path of our choosing. We can choose his or her place of education and the teachers who will help us create a new adult one day.

Somewhere, a town or school district will vote to charterize all of its schools and provide separate, superb facilities for individuals who cannot contribute to or grow within standard classroom environments. May God bless their endeavors. Otherwise and in spite of that, the resources the polity has decided to spend on each school-age child should be available for parents to spend as they see fit. Universal vouchers, universal responsibility. Let a teachers’ union prove that it delivers better education.