Coalition Executive Director Dave Machado has a new Carolina Journal op-ed out for National Charter Schools Week about the power of innovation and choice in education. K-12 education today faces complex problems, but empowering parents and experimentation can provide a “path through the chaos,” he writes.
Here’s an excerpt from his article:
Scanning through the education policy and political headlines is an exercise in chaos.
“Early stats don’t support school cellphone bans.” “Want high schoolers to read books?” “Preventing hazing is harder than you think.” “Is your online student a bot?” “Stop generation Alpha’s brain rot.”
It’s a litany of problems with precious few solutions, and the solutions that do make it into the mix face immediate second-guessing. It’s apparent to me that no single authority can possibly resolve all of the problems plaguing K-12 education today. And even if that authority somehow did exist, nobody would believe them anyway.
With no obvious national policy solution to stuttering national test scores and literacy rates, it seems clear that experimentation — together with empowering parents to choose among an array of schools with different teaching and curriculum styles — is the best path through the chaos.
There are three reasons for this. First, and most obviously, children are not all alike and they never have been. Some learn best in strict, highly predictable environments; others flourish in less structured, Montessori-style settings. This is obvious even for very young children, which explains the multitude of preschool philosophies from which parents can choose. Bizarrely, granting parents an array of choices for preschool is not controversial, but granting them the same array of choices for K-12 school is controversial.
Pressing all K-12 students into the same educational environment may have made good sense when the option was simply school or no school. But that’s no longer the case and hasn’t been for many years. Parents deserve options for their children’s schooling because not all children flourish in the same environment, and the more options the better.
Read the rest of the article on Carolina Journal.
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