Choice is the best, and perhaps only, thing that will save our schools and hence our nation | Eastern North Carolina Now

By:  Delma Blinson

Some will find this strange coming from me.  All of those school board members, superintendents and parents in a dozen school systems in Eastern North Carolina with which I worked helping the “redraw attendance lines” will no doubt wonder why I have changed my feelings about how public schools should be organized.  In those system we spend hundreds of “man-hours” deciding what was “best” for students and selling it to parents and communities.  I have now come to the conclusion the approach was wrong. 

Perhaps a word of explanation will illustrate why it was wrong.  Before our “system” of parent involvement in drawing attendance lines, those decisions were typically made by professional educators in the central office.  Working at the Rural Education Institute at East Carolina University we developed a system that relied on parent-based committees to redraw attendance area maps to be presented to school boards for adoption.  As often as not, the redrawing was compelled by the legal system to comply with government mandates, usually in the form of court desegregation orders.  The basic mandate was to achieve “racial balance” in each school.  Merging school districts within counties was another facet of this effort.  Both were sometimes called for shifting school attendance boundaries to fit changes in demographics. 

City school districts were losing students as parents moved to suburban areas surrounding inner cities.  It became ever increasingly more difficult to pass school construction bond issues and county commissions resisted supplementary tax districts that most city school districts had.  Since the supplemental taxes were based on property values, as enrollment declined, city districts were able to spend more and more per pupil, while counties struggled to provide adequate space for burgeoning suburban areas.

School choice was impractical because it was feared that it would result in “resegregation” via race.  The Justice Department fought school choice and Federal judges would have no part of it. 

Little known was the fact that school district merger and school attendance re-drawing were deemed by most in the Education Establishment as their sandbox and resisted parental involvement in systemic changes. 

But times have changed…and for the better.

School choice has come into its own now.  And it is fast becoming a wave that will drastically change public schools in the next few years.

North Carolina has dabbled with school choice by using it as an alternative for parents in low-performing schools to pull their children out and place them in other public schools“of the parents' choosing.”  The idea was slipped in to allow parents to even include choosing private schools.

But in recent years school choice has evolved in a dozen or so states into what is now being called “universal choice.”  That is, the state will give money (vouchers) to any parent who can then use the money to enroll their children wherever they think they can get a better education, be it public, parochial, private or homeschooling.

Arkansas is the most recent state to adopt universal choice. 

John Ransom, writing at www.readlion.com reports:  A bottom-up revolution is suddenly changing education and our country forever – this time for the better.

It’s too bad that some are missing out on the story.

In his latest piece for the New York Times, David Brooks complains that the country is missing out on the ripe conditions for education reform, inspired by the disruptions and problems  caused by COVID-19.

“You would think efforts by governors and mayors to address these problems would be leading newscasts and emblazoned across magazine covers on a weekly basis,” writes Brooks. “But this is not happening.”

In fact, an education revolution is happening in America, but maybe not the one for which Brooks and the New York Times pine.  

It’s a revolution led by parents and governors and legislators, who feel the traditional education establishment is pushing policies that perversely put educating kids last, substitute process for results, and remain slavishly wedded to union special interests rooted in the politics of the last century.

And while Brooks is right to say newscasts and magazines aren’t covering the education revolution, at least in the mainstream, that doesn’t mean an education revolution isn’t underway. 

Take Arkansas for example.

Shortly after her inauguration this year, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders proposed to raise teacher pay from $36,000 per year to $50,000, which would take the state from 48th to 4th in the nation in teacher pay. Her plan also includes teacher performance bonuses of up to $10,000.

No union has done as much for teacher pay.

But that’s not all. 

Sanders has also tied student loan forgiveness to teaching in the state, offering up to $6,000 in loan repayment by the state.

But the reforms don’t stop there, either.

The governor’s plan would also allow Arkansas parents to use state education funds to attend the school of their choice, whether that school is a private school, a public school, a homeschool or some hybrid.

In return, the state has mandated literacy for third grade students. 

Imagine that: an education system that mandates learning, rather than social justice outcomes or a progressive political check list.

It’s revolutionary. 

Why? Because voters, who are overwhelmingly supportive of the concept of school choice, have suddenly demanded it as an alternative to the failing public school system, which seems to make no one happy, including the unelected bureaucrats who have mismanaged it.

Polls show that voters are demanding their legislatures create more alternatives to the one-size-fits-all public education system, stuck in the permanent process of failure for over 50 years.

The demand is also creating election victories for those who would embrace it.

Ever since Glenn Youngkin’s 2021 gubernatorial victory in once-reliably-Democrat Virginia, a victory that was secured by making education reform the hallmark of his campaign, the floodgates have opened.

All over the country, local candidates – as opposed to federal ones – campaigned on school reform, especially expanding choices for parents in educating their kids.  

And they won. 

The moment, in other words, had met the movement, which is exactly how other revolutions have started.

The spotlight of the COVID-19 crisis made the failures of the public education system so glaring, the weakness of the political structures that protect it so obvious and the impetus to institute change so strong that change came not incrementally, but as a watershed. 

That’s why Arkansas is just the latest state to move on education reform.

At least 12 other states – Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Virginia – have instituted school choice measures just this year, some fueled by election victories.

Those election victories were enabled in part by an outdated education system that’s been more interested in political agendas, including teaching identity politics, than it is in educating kids. 

Parents have had enough. 

It’s no surprise that Biden and others on the left missed an education revolution that is truly about teaching kids.

It’s too bad that David Brooks and the New York Times missed it, too.

School choice is an idea whose time has come. 

However, parents being able to choose an alternative to having their kids stuck in failing schools, while essential, is not sufficient.  The truth of the matter is that the quality of a school rests on the teachers and primarily on the principal of each school.  The large urban school districts, such as Chicago, New York City, Detroit, Washington DC etc. have proven that more money is not the solution for poor performing schools.  The fundamental problem in these cities is the stranglehold the teacher unions have over those systems.  That fact was clearly visible during the Covid lockdowns.  They also prove how ineffective the U. S. Department of Education is.

But across the country, and particularly in North Carolina, the fundamental problem is the Education Establishment, which is focused on process rather than results, as Ransom points out.  And better results in student performance are not going to come until we have better teachers and principals.  And that requires major systemic changes in our educator preparation programs in higher education.

If choice is good for parents then choice should be extended to teachers and principals.  The best way to do that is to abolish the teacher/principal licensure program and replace it with open choice in two critical areas:  Allow principals to employ the best available people to teach regardless of “certification” and allow parents to choose the teachers of their children.  Radical as it may seem to some, principals should be elected by the parents in each school.  Every four years the question should be put to a vote of the parents:  Should Mr./Ms. John/Jane Doe be renewed for four more years?  Yes, or no.  Up or out.

Each school should be given an allotment of funds/vouchers for “support services” and allowed to choose the central office staff they wish to provide support services to their school.  Ditto the state Department of Public Instruction Curriculum and Instruction staffs.  They essentially become hired consultants. 

But most importantly local school districts should be mandated to train their own teachers and principals as long as student performance results are met satisfactorily.  They should be allowed to contract with other school districts and community colleges to train their staffs. That would apply also to college and university faculty.  Yes, I understand that most likely university training programs would fold.  Good!

Trainers of teachers and principals should be the best teachers who have proven they can produce student achievement and whose students become great teachers and principals who produce excellence in student performance.

If you want a model, consider the United States military.