How can we help responsible and empowered parents make better school choices for their children?
Summary
- Education plays a vital role in the betterment of people and communities. It encourages social engagement, fosters skill development, and can help students to realize their potential and worth.
- Bureaucratic and political systems are not the best way to meet each student’s educational needs. They do not provide environments that address learning diversity or parental wishes. They do not reward innovative teachers or instruction.
- Allowing choice in education opens paths to academic success and content people. Tailor-made learning environments prepare students for diverse challenges. They allow students and staff to find a place to excel. This ought to be more available and affordable for families.
State education policy plays a prominent role in our lives
State education policy influences the lives of North Carolina’s 1.8 million K-12 students. Spending on education represents nearly $9.8 billion of our state budget. The present approach to education policy affects students, families, educators, and taxpayers. Thus, the decisions made by legislators and state agencies today —and the accessibility of public schools, charters, private schools, and home schools— will determine if students will be ready for college life, work life, social situations, truth-seeking, interactions with the law, leadership, and even potentially life after death.
Central planning does not adequately prepare students for a vast, ever-changing world
Limited-option, uniform education policy forces districts, schools, and teachers to be governed by politics and bureaucracy. It does not promote personalized and effective learning environments or curricula. It fails students, literally; high grades and attendance are not prioritized. When politicians and public agencies play a more prominent role in shaping educational policy than students or families, we do not prepare those students for a diverse society or a dynamic economy.
Choices foster dynamic, permissive, preparative education
Our approach is a different opportunity for North Carolina’s students, families, and educators. They deserve the freedom to access options for student success. If public education spending is leaner and are taxes returned, education alternatives become more affordable. Teachers deserve the freedom to find a job that rewards them for being engaged, innovative, or simply uncommon. Our approach allows for a marketplace of options where competition enhances appeal and performance while balancing costs. Public funding can be curtailed to allow for a level field with the alternative options.
North Carolina can promote this dynamic educational system based on freedom and choices both between and within schools. It covers the desires of parents and students with varying goals such as varying sizes of classrooms, the cost-quality trade off, curriculum content, tailoring to special needs, and more. This often makes attendance, student discipline, and grade performance among the highest priorities for schools but allows schools to choose other priorities a family might prefer. When schools are allowed to succeed or fail based on their merit, a balance of satisfaction is achieved for everyone involved once bad schools improve or become replaced.
Temperate, needed, edifying solutions for education policy
- Keep unaltered North Carolina’s state-funded Education Savings Account program and Opportunity Scholarship program to allow students with special learning needs and the most financial hardship access to learning alternatives.
- Expand open enrollment within and between public school districts, allowing families to find the best fit within the public school system.
- Resize public K-12 education funding to reflect the number of students enrolled that year. Parents should be given tax relief per student attending an alternative to public-funded schools.
- Diversify curriculum and teaching by cutting from the budget mid-level administrators and by deregulating education.
- Cease the hiring of K-12 social workers and focus public schools on result-oriented education of students.
- Disallow the State from requiring children attend pre-kindergarten education so that parents can choose how to raise their young children.