‘Tis the season for New Year’s resolutions. If you’re a lawmaker, reforming education should be at the top of your list—but not in the way you might think.
Education reform often plays second fiddle to “bigger” policy issues voters say they care more about. For instance, education finished behind the economy, terrorism, foreign policy, healthcare, gun policy, immigration, and social security in Pew Research’s poll of the top voting issues in the 2016 election.
Because voters tend to put education policy on the backburner, legislators do the same. Even when it does comes time to “do something” about our failing education system, lawmakers’ default move is to lazily throw more money at the problem, even though over the past several decades, increased government funding for education has failed to result in improved academic achievement.
While some might lament legislators’ unwillingness to seize even more control of education, there are good reasons to believe getting the government out of the education business is actually the best thing lawmakers can do. After years of wasting billions of dollars on programs that benefit few kids, it’s time, as Monty Python would say, “for something completely different.”
The United States has for decades utilized the ZIP-code-based, one-size-fits-all government public education model, and what used to serve as a mediocre system of educating children has devolved into a corrupt and extremely expensive failure. Reforming U.S. education for the better requires forming it anew, not simply tweaking standards here and there—and certainly not writing increasingly bigger checks that will ultimately get wasted on the same-old, worthless measures. What America needs is fewer bureaucrats and government controls and more freedom for parents, which can best be achieved through a multitude of school choice programs.
Get the Exclusive
01.22.2025