States Prove that Educational Freedom Works

State lawmakers will surely haggle over education policy this legislative session, but hopefully they will remember the purpose of any education system during their battle over budgets: excellence in education and an equal opportunity for every child to succeed. The term “education reform” has taken on many meanings since its inception, but its foundations are based on educational freedom: Freedom for parents to determine their child’s education; freedom from the teachers unions that cloak ineffective teachers; and freedom from the archaic ideas of what creates a successful individual. It is disheartening that some fight against the idea of educational freedom and even cling to the status quo. After all, isn’t America the land of the free?

Without educational freedom, the United States will fail to develop career and college ready students prepared for a global economy and a successful future. International test scores prove American children can barely keep pace with their global counterparts. As the United States Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said of the results of the Program of International Student Assessment (PISA), “…[t]he big picture of U.S. performance on the 2012 PISA is straightforward and stark: It is a picture of educational stagnation.”

For me, step #1 is removing the feds from every aspect of education. There were schools in the 18th Century, and our Founders saw the wisdom to leave it out of the Constitution, and thus, by the 10th Amendment, it belongs to the states. The feds conveniently ignore this by making it "voluntary" to follow their dictates... but any schools failing to obey get their funding cut off. The fads only contribute about 7-8 percent of the budget, but schools (thanks primarily to unions) are stretched so thin that they cannot afford to lose 7-8 percent, so they meekly comply.

My viewpoint however, is that if we have 50 different systems, the best ideas will become apparent, and those states which didn't implement them initially can copy them soon thereafter. The crucible of ideas gets tested and compared to many others. The best ones survive. When we all simply obey the over-reaching and all-encompassing ideas from DC (which are often the worst kind of feel-good pap, like Common Core), we do not get to see what other ideas may bring. There is no comparison. It is simply a total failure, with no hope of competition for improvement.

And, not surprisingly, the Fed were mostly not involved in education, until Jimmy Carter created the Dept of Education in 1979.

One could make a better case for educational freedom than a badly administered test.

The PISA test fails to control for educational admissions criteria, which can serve to make the US look worse than they actually are. In the case of the United States, this means that the open admissions catches the good, the average, and the bad. In other countries with more restrictive admissions, it only catches the good students. With that in mind, PISA only serves one purpose - to make the US look bad in comparison to European/Asian systems.

And, not surprisingly, the Fed were mostly not involved in education, until Jimmy Carter created the Dept of Education in 1979.

Someone else posted this on FR at some point, but I forgot to copy who/where:

In 2010, Barack Obama called for fixing the public education system by giving us the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and “Race to the Top,”

which he said would fix the education system already fixed by the 2001 GW Bush and Ted Kennedy legislation called “No Child Left Behind,”

which was supposed to fix a system supposedly already fixed by a 1994 piece of federal legislation called “Goals 2000,”

which was supposed to fix a system already fixed by “America 2000,”

which was a 1991 response during the Bush administration to a 1983 federal report on education called “A Nation at Risk,

which was published a full four years after Jimmy Carter first fixed the nation’s public school system by establishing a cabinet-level Department of Education in 1979.

"Freedom from archaic ideas of what constitutes a successful individual"?

Freedom from ideas?
Deciding what is to be labelled as "archaic"?? (old and therefore somehow bad... like our Founders and their Constitution??)

Smells an awful lot like someone has the progressive infection, even with some notions in there that I would get behind.

I respect your comment, but I have a point, myself. When I was at my 50^th and again at my 55^th class reunion, I could not help but notice that all my former classmates were just - mature adults. It didn’t matter if they had been on the honor roll or if they had been much further down in the class rankings. They were adults, and to be respected as such.
That sounds perfectly obvious but in fact it was, absurdly, a bit of a revelation. Why? Because in school, the only setting in which I had known them, they had been a milieu in which they were arbitrarily at a disadvantage. As adults, no teacher disciplined them for not being interested in what the teacher demanded that they pay attention to. Some of us were interested, others not so much. That is the fundamental difference between being treated as an adult and being treated as a child. Lots of stuff that you and I interested ourselves in and would miss not knowing, those people as kids didn’t interest themselves in, and they were - to one extent or another - demeaned for it. The earnings and prestige of the members of the class as adults is quite imperfectly correlated with their performance in high school.
One of my cousins has two sons; both now on their own. The elder is a veterinarian; the younger went to trade school rather than college and is now a diesel mechanic. "You pays you money and you takes you choice". I remember a fellow test engineer once telling me he hoped one day to attain the salary of a top technician. Both require education, one more general and one more specialized. Unless diesel engines become obsolete, that diesel mechanic will do well for a lifetime.

Charter schools, opportunity scholarships, digital learning opportunities, blended learning capabilities, private schools, teacher effectiveness and educational savings accounts are proven options that expand parental choice and educational freedom. Excellence in education should be every state’s number one legislative priority in 2015 and every year following. If we do not prepare our students with the ability to think critically, solve real-world problems and do so in a way that is competitive with the rest of the world, America will fail. Educational freedom is key to the success of this nation.
I have a granddaughter who, because of an illness, is “hopelessly behind” in this academic year. Except that she will keep right up with her class, because she is doing distance learning over the internet to catch up.
Something is wrong with the traditional educational model if she can so readily obtain her education without setting foot in a classroom. It makes you wonder if the 9-3 brick-and-mortar school is obsolete.

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