California k-12 schools are producing a product that ranks near the bottom of a nation that stands in the lower third of the industrialized world. It is also one of the most expensive systems in the world, now costing over $11,000 per child per year (State, Federal, and local funds included). Under Gray Davis, education spending per student has increased nearly 30%, while classroom performance remains relatively unimproved. The system is broken and the State is nearly bankrupt. So what can we do?
Here is what Republicans have already done. They sponsored Proposition 227, mandating English only instruction. Immigrants supported it, while liberal Democrats and the teachers' unions (who make higher salaries for bilingual instruction) fought it to their last dime. Ending bilingual education was of immediate help to immigrant children, giving them a real opportunity to strive for the American Dream (some test scores in Orange County rose 27% the first year).
Republicans supported Proposition 209, banning racial preferences. So Democrats ignore the law and STILL cling to affirmative action, which discriminates against many students of immigrant origin while they are still working to undermine the ban on bilingual education!
Why conservatives don't emphasize these distinctions to immigrant families who otherwise vote Democratic, is mystifying.
On the other hand, union-dominated Democrats foisted Proposition 8, mandating class-size-reduction. The law not only hugely increased costs without significantly improving test scores, it seriously harmed children in inner-city school districts. Their best teachers left to pursue new openings at successful suburban schools.
So who really cares about the future performance of our children: liberal Democrats who build a welfare state beholden to the teachers' unions, or conservatives who need competitive and productive employees in a free market?
So what more do conservatives propose to do from here?
First, we must break up large, unified school districts. The supposed purpose of consolidation was to reduce the cost of overhead and to strengthen the districts’ collective bargaining power, but that isn’t how it has turned out. Instead, district bureaucracies have become enormous and the resulting issues are so complex that taxpayers and parents are pushed aside by an organizational machine controlled by those receiving the funds. This trend has effectively excluded parents from public school decision-making.
The governor could assist formation of corporate service associations for school districts so that they can select specific services from the State in return for divesting academic operations into smaller institutions. Smaller school districts will give parents a stronger voice on district boards. The principal barrier to making this possible is to develop programs for children with special needs. Here is where we can turn to parents for solutions.
"Professional educators" often assert that parents on local School Boards aren’t qualified to make many administrative decisions, especially over programs for children with special needs. So, let's look at an education success-story that not only proves the argument wrong, it points toward a total transformation in public education.
Home education is enjoying a renaissance in America, and religious freedom isn’t the reason. Parents are choosing to home school to assure a better education for their children, whose learning habits they know best. A family bond of patience and discipline is a critical factor in student success, especially in a challenging situation. What many people don't know about home-schools is that they have a high percentage of students with genetic, behavioral, and developmental disabilities that had often been poorly served by public institutions. Even with that statistical disadvantage, SAT, ACT, and STAR test scores strongly indicate that home education is producing superior results across the entire spectrum of individual ability.
So parents ARE competent to make choices about their children’s education, and home schools successfully manage nearly every type of specialized educational problem. So what are they doing right that we can apply to public institutions?
As home-educators have grown in number, they have been organizing into loosely knit education cooperatives that point to a new form of public education: decentralized, customer-oriented learning networks, using customized products designed to meet individual interests and abilities. That promises what 21st Century education could become: a multi-disciplinary market of customized learning services.
We are already starting to see this transformation. Software and curriculum companies are finding a growing market of home school customers committed to gaining competitive advantages. Colleges and univer¬sities are offering online degrees because they need superior students to assure productive graduates. Superior teachers could get rich transmitting their ideas and methods to a mass-market over the Internet. Where better to develop those products and sell them to the world than California?
So how can home education benefit children in public schools?
The State can use private and home-education markets as if each school was an R&D laboratory developing and testing learning tools and services. Parents on public school boards could select from among a range of guaranteed products that the State would fund for those public schools participating in the divestiture program. Insurance on the guarantee would cover the cost of remedial education if the product fails to meet warranted performance. It is a gradual transformation, from experimenting on our children with untested academic theories, to contracting for innovative tools and methods that have been proven in the marketplace.
Of course, any company offering such a guarantee would demand control over how it is delivered. Most would have to rely upon their own employees trained in the methods they offer, else they could not be forced to warrant their product…
It's a way of privatizing the schools from within, subject by subject, contract by contract, by individual child with special needs if need be.
So what do we do when the union howls? Crush that union, in the name of restoring the integrity of the profession it fails to represent. It richly deserves it, and not a few teachers agree. The key to do doing it, is to cut off the money. First, we must free California’s teachers from being forced, illegally, to support the radical political agenda of national unions. A conservative Governor of California will enforce the U.S. Supreme Court decision, Communications Workers v. Beck, that prohibits unions from requiring campaign contributions in union dues without teacher’s permission. Second, teachers' unions have also been illegally using funds for political partisanship, which is specifically exempted from their tax-exempt status. A conservative attorney general would prosecute union officials for tax fraud and demand back taxes from the union treasury.
Any rational person should commend many of California's hard-working teachers for their often heroic commitment to educate future generations, under what can be dangerous and frustrating working conditions. Merit pay for such outstanding teachers is only fair. Sole-bargaining provisions or programs usurp the ability of locally-elected school board members to recognizing these outstanding teachers.
We must also attract individuals from outside the teaching profession who have the technical skills in subjects which many "professional educators" are demonstrably incompetent: particularly math and science. The private system mentioned above is an ideal means.
Finally, we must address those who have been mistreated by the system, and abused even more by affirmative action. Top graduates of inner city schools are most often not ready for university level work. To enroll them at the University of California is unjust to them and to the rest of the students who have to accommodate them. The fix is to offer students with high grades from bad schools and mediocre SATs a free, two-year, junior college education to prepare them for high level work. Then let them enroll at UC having lost only a year (net). It's the best that can be done to redress a fundamental injustice, but we must have a place where credentials are colorblind and that is at the doors of the university.
Federal education dollars aren’t worth the price of Federal controls. Private and home education both leave the State with more money to spend per-child and provide a competitive reason for public schools to keep their customers. All we have to do is keep government from regulating new educational methods out of existence and California can rise from the ashes of a broken system and lead the way once again, into a world of exciting possibilities for your children.
Education Policy Components