LOCAL CONTROL MEANS CHOICE
It is
highly unusual for government school employees to endorse school choice. But
one public school superintendent in Fulton, Georgia gets it: There’s nothing
more [in line with] local control ... than choosing where your kids go to
school, Robert Avossa told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Local
control is a weasel phrase that in education often means union control. Liberal
local control proponents often insist the ability to elect a school board means
government schools reflect the will of the families they govern. In truth,
school boards are typically elected in low-turnout elections during off-season
times such as spring. This means special interests such as teachers unions and
the education establishment determine the electoral outcome at the expense of
kids and individual choice, as the Hoover Institution’s Terry Moe and others
have exhaustively demonstrated.
Sullying
the name and concept of local control, however, doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea,
just as the prevalence of divorce doesn’t mean marriage is worthless and fake
Rolexes don’t mean the real thing is low-quality. People who want others to
accept bad ideas must cloak them, so they use a worthy name without its
substance.
So local
control, when it means freeing families to meet their needs as they determine
them and not a cover for slightly smaller central planning and coercion, is a
central feature of any good education system, just as Avossa says. It’s similar
to the concept of subsidiarity, in which responsibility for any one person or
concern belongs to the individual or organization as close to that person or
concern as possible. For most children, the people appropriately responsible
for their care and upbringing are their parents. That’s why local control in
education should mean parent control, and thus school choice.
Avossa
plans to listen some more to the parents who trust their children to his care
and ultimately start a portfolio of schools that respond to their desires:
Montessori, unified K-8 without a separate middle school, and so forth. That’s
certainly a good start and, again, far closer to family freedom than most
public school systems, which are often not acutely responsive to family
concerns.
True
local control, by the way, is why charter schools do not destroy representative
government, because they cannot compel students to attend. Every family that
chooses a charter school implicitly votes for its existence by bringing their
government education funds to it. If they aren’t pleased, they can take their
kids and their money to another school. If too few people vote for the school
that way, it dissolves, with far less harm than Detroit is facing. The more
people’s lives and preferences are subject to central planning, the worse the
outcome when that planning ultimately fails.
SOURCE: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
IN THIS
ISSUE:
- School Choice Roundup
- Common Core Watch
- Education Today
- TESTING: Analysts square off
on whether states should let parents choose what tests they’ll use to measure
their kids’ schools, rather than having the state dictate
curriculum and education philosophy by mandating certain tests.
- SOUTH CAROLINA: A local
school district considers having a successful private school run a failing
public school.
- NEW JERSEY: So many students take advantage of an inter-district
choice program that the state may move to limit it. To get
districts to let students transfer in, the state offered to pay their
tuition, and now that’s getting expensive.
- OKLAHOMA: Several decades of
experience with both show lawmakers should expand school choice and ditch government preschool.
Oklahoma’s preschool program is essentially a waste of money, while school
choice saves money and benefits kids.
Common
Core Watch
- PEARL HARBOR DAY: A leading
Common Core textbook treats World War II as if Americans were the cruel
aggressors and war can never be just.
- INDIANA: Legislative leaders
plan to push a bill to drop Common Core for Indiana standards.
- WRITING: Common Core’s
writing samples exhibit a bias towards citing evidence for the sake of evidence,
even if it promotes untruths and nonsense.
- WISCONSIN: After a series of
hearings produced little action from lawmakers, conservative groups urge Gov. Scott Walker to reject
Common Core.
Education
Today
- GLOBAL: New international
test results came out Tuesday, showing the U.S. sliding further behind other developed
countries in math, science, and reading. The Obama
administration decided to release the results early to advocacy groups that
favor its agenda, rather than the traditional route of turning
them over to journalists and researchers.
- WAIVERS: Fifteen states ask the federal government for testing waivers to
roll out Common Core and 12 ask for waivers from tying the test
results to teacher evaluations for a year.
- GERMANY: The U.S. Supreme
Court orders the Obama administration to respond to a German homeschooling family’s plea for
asylum. Germany outlaws homeschooling, and the Romeike children
will likely be seized if the family returns. Even so, they appear to be
the only people the administration wants to deport.
Thank you
for reading! If you need a quicker fix of news about school choice, you can
find daily updates online under the Ed News Roundup at http://news.heartland.org/education.
We’re
planning in earnest for our 2014 education projects. If you’d like Heartland Institute
Research Fellow Joy Pullmann to keep up the good work รข€ on
education issues, please consider making a contribution today! You can earmark
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Joy
writes this e-newsletter, is managing editor of School Reform News, AND
is available for speaking engagements on Common Core and other education
topics. For more information, contact Heartland Events Manager Nikki Comerford
at 312/377-4000, email ncomerford@heartland.org.
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