A parent-centered, state-based rebirth of American K-12 education
Once in the hazy past, the K-12 education system in America was considered the global gold standard. For decades, the world looked upon the U.S. with envy. But it was hard to replicate: American educational greatness was not imposed by a sweeping national command structure. Rather, it emerged state by state from a patchwork of local control across rural, suburban and urban districts of various sizes. What all those districts had in common was their accountability to their communities and to the families they served. The closest thing to an overarching command structure came from each state government, not a centralized bureaucracy.
In the 1970s, the U.S. education system began losing its dominance. Around the same time, local control and state guidance both began to lose their former primacy. National teacher unions had suddenly become a major force in U.S. education. And the launch of the U.S. Dept. of Education in 1979 heralded a new era – an era of stagnation and political inertia.
Fast-forward to the 2020s, and the U.S. falls close to the bottom of the international ranking in math, the major domain for study in the most recent Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) reporting.
This relative decline is not, as some loud voices would have us believe, very much about the money. The U.S. spends about 40% more per student than the average of the 38 peer countries.
In fact, even as inflation-adjusted education spending increased 185% from 1970 to 2012, math, science and reading scores flatlined.
The state of Utah for years flagellated itself regarding its lowest-in-the-nation student spending. But one study found that Utah was performing about as well as demographic peer states – despite spending roughly half as much per pupil. Utah also generally outperformed the other Mountain States, despite spending the least.
None of this is to say that money can’t help. But simply throwing more money at mediocrity won’t make the mediocrity fix itself.
Nor will flailing about with flavor-of-the-month curriculum gimmickry. Southern states like Mississippi have soared up from the bottom of the pack by going “old school” – getting back to approaches like phonics that those of us old enough to remember took for granted. And, if the Urban Institute’s demographically adjusted numbers are to be believed, Mississippi and Louisiana now generally outperform Massachusetts (and the rest of the nation) in math and reading score comparisons.
This is a massive change from 20 years ago, when a quiet revolution was just beginning. The basis of the revolution was simple: Stop treating parents and their children as cogs in a rusty machine.
Until then, public education from coast to coast was beset by a feeling that nothing could ever change, that America’s K-12 education woes seemed intractable. Doing right by parents required that you run a gauntlet of other “stakeholders” – like the teacher unions, local school boards, state policymakers, education experts, and federal overlords. The local district held a monopoly on the supply of schools. Those who couldn’t afford to live in a high-rent neighborhood were fated to attend whatever school fell into their catchment area, regardless of its performance.
But then came vouchers. And charter schools. And open enrollment. And, with it all, school choice.
I was working on education policy in New Orleans when the Hurricane Katrina disaster unfolded and, out of the wet ashes, an entirely new school system arose. The state took over failing schools. The local district was left with the remainder – a handful of high performers. And every single one of them in both districts went charter. It was the nation’s first all-charter school system. There was competition between the state recovery district and the local district. There was competition among the schools themselves, for students and the resources that followed the children. During those first years, public education in New Orleans was a wide-open market, where entrepreneurship, accountability and innovation were embraced, and performance was rewarded. The grand charter school experiment, whatever its hiccups, was a glorious improvement from the grim, failed monopoly that preceded it.
The national teacher unionistas lined up wherever they could find microphones to condemn the experiment and claim that the upward trajectory in student performance was a lie. But the facts were not on their side, and parents generally loved the new system. There was no putting the genie back in the bottle.
In recent years, following Arizona’s example, 21 states have embraced (to varying degrees) a step further in the pro-family revolution: education savings accounts. As with charter schools, the money can follow the child to an alternative education setting – even toward tuition at a private or parochial school and homeschooling expenses. ESAs have been making rapid progress both across the country and within states. And there’s still much room to enhance and grow these programs.
Some states are also embracing open enrollment. Open enrollment laws allow students to transfer to public schools outside their residential catchment area if space is available. This approach proceeds from a basic principle embraced by a large majority of Americans: Your ability to afford to live in a high-end neighborhood shouldn’t determine your ability to get a good education. Open enrollment still has a long way to go, even in states like Utah where the laws on the books are well regarded. But the momentum is building.
For many, that may still mean a traditional public school. To be clear, the vast majority (over 80%) of American schoolchildren attend such schools rather than private or charter schools, although the traditional public school proportion is decreasing. Meanwhile, outside of this mix, homeschooling is seeing a rapid ascent.
Regardless of the changing mix, we are arriving at a new paradigm in many states: Parents are no longer seen as just one stakeholder group among many. Instead, under this new paradigm, education dollars exist to serve parents, and parents should have some measure of freedom to place their children in the educational setting the best serves their particular needs and values.
As if to underscore this state-led revolution, the U.S. Department of Education is in the process of dissolution, 46 years after its launch.
The usual suspects who oppose any change to the status quo, schoolchildren be damned, have emerged to oppose this effort. Those who would like to see a resumption of federal guidance calling for racial quotas in school discipline and transgender bathroom policies depend upon a top-down centralized bureaucracy. Indeed, “stakeholders” like the national teacher unions have a vested interest in centralization, since they themselves operate on that model and benefit from an entity through which they can impose their political will from coast to coast.
Closing the department and returning authority for education to the states, by contrast, brings the education systems and education dollars much closer to those they are meant to serve: Parents and their children.
Peter Reichard is chief development officer at the Sutherland Institute in Utah. He has served as a public policy organization executive and researcher for more than 20 years.
