Make Public Schools Accountable by Empowering Parental Choice

OPINION

Laura Hollis’ recent column, "Don't Look to Today's Schools to Make Great Kids," accurately describes the inexcusably poor performance of too many of America’s K-12 institutions of learning.

If, as Professor. Hollis stated, "our schools cannot successfully execute their most basic and fundamental responsibilities," obvious questions are:

"Why is this true? And  . . .

"What can we do?"

As to why.

Traditional public (read government) schools are virtually monopolies, enjoying approximately 90% market share allowing them to institutionalize a risk-averse culture totally unaccountable for results.

Most public school teachers and administrators are good people who "care" about their students. But, let's not forget, they work in a system that does not incentivize nor reward success. Thus it's a bureaucratic structure, one completely devoid of consequences for failure.

What explains chronically poor results?

This unaccountable system is under the charge of local boards of education.

They are responsible for setting school policies, practices, and operations, including work and compensation rules for employees, etc.

Insidiously, these boards are elected and controlled by teachers’ unions who represent those very same employees, meaning employees are in charge of the employer.

Much like a govenrnment protects its entrenched bureaucracy first, unions' highest priorities are to protect their members' careers and maximize their compensation, not to educate kids.

Let's face it: life-destroying failure is the predictable result of such a flawed arrangement.

And yes, this means the fox is guarding the hen house.

It also means we're left wondering why there are no eggs left for breakfast.

So, the antidote is to treat teachers as the professionals they are by compensating them individually based on their performance while disempowering, decertifying, and refusing to bargain collectively with teacher and labor unions.

Despite the hue and cry of status quo apologists, spending is not the problem, as the national average dollars spent per pupil from 2011 to 2021, in inflation-adjusted dollars, grew from $10,648 to $15,683 but scores continued to decline.

Where has that money gone?

Not to teachers, not to classrooms, but to administration and bureaucracy.

Over the years (1950 to 2012) student enrollment increased by 96%, teaching positions by 252%, while administrative positions skyrocketed by a whopping 702%.

It's not an issue of how much is spent, but rather of how it's spent.

States currently fund local school districts based on student enrollment — meat in the seat— meaning there is no correlation between what is spent and the quality of what is produced and how well students are educated.

Again, success is not rewarded, failure is not penalized.

Actually, it's worse than that. Poorer-performing schools are subsidized with more dollars because of misguided, mostly inaccurate assumptions that insufficient funding is the only explanation for their academic failures.

From where do those additional dollars come? From budgets of successful schools, of course. Perversely, the "blob," as former U.S. Secretary of Education Bill Bennett called the system, rewards failure and penalizes success.

It's no wonder we get more of the former and less of the latter.

Enough about the problem, although there is plenty more to tell.

What is the solution?

Resolution of it is very simple.

Create a marketplace and break the monopoly.

Take power and funding out of the hands of providers (schools and systems) and place it in the hands of consumers (parents).

Fund demand, not supply.

Force all schools to compete, and parents will reward the most flexible, creative, responsive, highest-achieving, and highest-performing schools with the privilege of educating their children.

If parents control the dollars allocated to the education of children, they will spend those dollars at the schools they think best meet their children’s needs.

What a radical idea!

Parents creating success by voting with their feet.

In a competition-driven marketplace, parents empowered with the funds allocated to each of their children will shop and compare.

Schools will either meet their expectations, or parents will take their previously trapped children and their funding to schools that do.

Another radical idea --- reward higher-performing teachers (measured by students’ longitudinal improvement) with higher pay.

Break the current system of paying teachers the same regardless of the results they generate. While we are it, how about prioritizing teachers over bean counters by paying them more than bureaucrats — aligning reward with value added?

It aint’ complicated — school choice and education freedom work! Will the teachers’ unions fight to maintain their protection racket and fight against accountability for results?

Will the teachers’ unions continue to put the interest of their adult members ahead of those of the children they are supposed to educate? Self-evident answers suggest the fierceness of the battles to come and the indisputable need to win them.

In 2012, the National Education Association (NEA) tweeted, "Educators love their students and know better than anyone what they need to learn and thrive."

What?!

No way do educators in government schools know better than parents.

When parents are empowered with choice, schools will respond and improve or suffer the consequences. Nothing less than the future of our republic is at stake.

Today’s and tomorrow’s students need to be educated about what's so special about America, how critical it is for them to protect their futures, and how fragile and vulnerable are the freedoms and liberty for which too many have sacrificed so much and that we take for granted.

Over 240 years ago, Thomas Jefferson warned that America’s destiny depended upon a well-educated citizenry. We can no longer allow our future leaders to be condemned to schools failing miserably at educating them.

Transformative improvement in the quality of education delivered to all children will only happen when we fund demand rather than supply, align incentives and penalties with results, and empower parents to choose schools that they decide are best for their children.

Steve Schuck is chairman of Schuck-Chapman Companies, a real estate developer based in Colorado Springs. With his late wife, he founded Parents Challenge, which is privately funded, and empowers low income families with informational and financial resources to choose which schools are best for their children, be they traditional public, charter public, private and/or home.