Education is the key to unlocking a prosperous future.
At the heart of education should always be the students.
Unfortunately, education has become weighed down with
administration that has shifted the focus from educating
students to maintaining an excessive level of bureaucracy
through expanded unionization and regulation. It’s time to
unbundle education from the federal government down to
the local level.
Of course, most teachers are in the field of education to
foster intellectual development for eager minds. Through
a system of accountability, we should reward those teachers
whose students excel and better evaluate those whose
students perform poorly. Performance incentives work in
business, and they will work in education, too.
A critical component of improving education in our country
is to decentralize the federal government’s control over it.
Children are best served when the teachers, parents and
principals are making the day-to-day decisions, coupled
with the leadership of local municipalities, school boards
and states. What might work for a third grader in Oklahoma
might not work for a third grader in Hawaii.
Another way we can put kids first is to offer school choice
as a real option for educational competition. This means
expanding school vouchers and charter schools. Such
measures have proven time and time again to best serve the
students, many of whom do not have the economic means
of attending better schools. In a post-Katrina New Orleans,
these programs were immensely popular with both the
parents and the students, giving opportunities to children
who might otherwise have been stuck in poor-performing,
if not failing, schools.
Unbundling education means putting kids first. It means
rewarding those teachers who enrich the lives of their
students, and it means holding those accountable who do
not. It means putting students before union interests, and it
means keeping their development paramount. Unbundling
education means localizing education- making those on
the ground responsible for the teaching and learning that
happens in our local communities. Unbundling education
means offering parents choices for their children to create
a truly competitive educational system.