We at the Convention of States Project believe one very simple truth: that decisions are best made as close to home as possible.
When American citizens are given the power to make their own decisions, our country flourishes. But when federal bureaucrats in D.C. determine how we live our lives, our institutions flounder.
That's the story behind our public education system. As Lindsey Burke over at The Daily Signal reports, federal mandates have done nothing to improve the outcomes of students:
For decades, policymakers and education officials have attempted to bolster school “accountability” by increasing regulations on schools across the board—public, charter, and private. They have tried to do so at the federal level for half a century, with federal intervention in K-12 education hitting a high-water mark under the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind policy and the Obama administration’s attempts to pressure states into adopting Common Core.
Yet ever-increasing government intervention in schooling has had little positive impact on education outcomes writ large. Math and reading achievement outcomes have been largely stagnant since the 1970s for high school seniors, while graduation rates have seen only modest improvements (and even those figures may be artificially inflated).
About one-third of high school graduates have to take remedial courses in college, one-third of Americans cannot name a single branch of government, and 20 percent of high school graduates who want to join the Army cannot do so because they cannot pass the Armed Forces Qualification Test.
It’s no surprise, then, that families have been looking for alternatives to geographically-assigned district schools. Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia have begun to offer alternatives, enacting private school choice options such as vouchers, tax credit scholarships, and education savings accounts.
Although the education choice landscape is growing, government officials who take a heavy-handed approach to regulation threaten its long-term success. Instead of freeing traditional public schools from bureaucratic red tape that has tied the hands of educators and stifled innovation, some policymakers want to expand that top-down regulatory approach to the growing private school choice sector.
New educational systems are good, but we need a more effective solution to government overreach. Rather than working within the paradigm D.C. has given us (that the feds should control education), what if we created a new paradigm?
What if we could prohibit the federal government from being involved in the education of our children?
Congress will never pass such a law, and the Courts will never reduce their own power, but We the People can do it with an Article V Convention of States.
A Convention of States can propose constitutional amendments that limit the power and jurisdiction of the federal government. These amendments can remove Washington from our most important decisions (education, healthcare, etc), and unleash the potential of the people and the states to solve problems as they see fit.
Sign the Convention of States Petition below to get involved!
