Choice in Education

Fixing the Schools from the inside > out

    There is a lot of noise being made these days days about school choice, school vouchers, more money for education, etc, etc.  These are all valid solutions to the problem of school curriculums that apparently are out of touch with parent's wishes as well as what is needed to produce graduates who are reasonably competent in the basic skills necessary to pursue one's happiness in life as a productive and self reliant member of society.  

     I'd like to throw one more solution to this problem on the table -- curriculum choice.   What is curriculum choice?  When it comes time to enroll your child in a public school, it seems logical that

Public schools should be required to offer parents (and older children) a significant choice in curriculums to enroll in.

    Under such a system

• a school (through their school boards) would develop and offer at least two, if not three or more, different curriculums for younger kids.  Ideally, the curriculum goals would be determined by a mix of business and parental groups with the educators sorting out the details of how to best implement these goals using the tools and resources available to schools.  

• Educators are the employees, not the "grand poobas" of education.  Their job is to teach what we as parents tell them to teach, not for them to teach what they want to teach.  The current system of having educators decide what to teach is a little like having the patients run the asylum.

• Parents would have the ability to choose what curriculum they feel is best for their child's education, given their assessment of their child's abilities and their own perspectives on what they feel is important.  

• A school would then have the modest task of determining which teachers would teach which curriculums.  It would seem appropriate to test teachers on their knowledge and abilities in any curriculums they wish to teach.  This would place a modest degree of objectivity to determining which teachers would teach which curriculums.

• A central core of subject matter and some sort of competency testing to pass on to the next level would seem appropriate.  

   Such a system of choice would work within the current public school system. Curriculums would have the ability to evolve by the parent's wishes and experience. Currently, most curriculums are devised by educational bureaucrats, many of whom have limited private sector work experience where most people end up living and working.  They also seem to have a propensity to fit a political agenda into the current curriculums so that curriculums evolve towards political goals of educational bureaucrats rather than being representative of the public at large and the diverse abilities of individual teachers in the public school system.  

    Such a system of curriculum choice could be implemented by a progressive school board, a school, school district, or progressive state legislatures. It would even work at charter and private schools.   It doesn't require one to turn the current public school system upside down.  The end result would likely redirect our educational system forward towards a vibrant and diverse the future as seen by the population at large, rather than off on a tangent to serve as a propaganda tool for the elitist educator's agenda.

    Or at least this is how I see how to bring individuality back to our schools. Feel free to share this idea with others, including your legislators.  

    While on the topic of education, one might ponder about how there are close analogies between between our education and health care systems.  Our current public school system is like having a singular managed health care financing industry that offers only the benefits and treatments it wants to offer, not what people or society feel should be offered.  In the case of education, the goal of our managed educational system appears to be to graduate more and more people who only see and agree with the goals and perspectives of the educational management system.