Public schools today tend to be clustered in districts governed by centralized bureaucracies that oversee every detail of what goes on in individual schools, from budgets to personnel to curriculum.
How can a distant district office bureaucrat know how to run a school better than the principals and teachers who work there? And what options do parents have if they are not happy with their child’s school? Many families are not able to send their kids to private school or homeschool.
What we need is the creation of charter schools that operate free from school district control, dictate their own instructional programs, and make their own personnel decisions - including hiring talented non-union and uncertified teachers who lack ed-school degrees.
Considerable research has looked at the effectiveness of charter schools. While the findings of these studies vary, for the most part they have found that, contrary to the concerns of many charter school opponents:
● Charter schools increase the test scores of students attending the charter
● Charter schools increase the likelihood of their students graduating, going on to college, and persisting in college.
● Charter schools improve the test scores of the students who remain in the local public district schools.
● Charter schools lead to greater racial integration in schools
● Charter schools save taxpayers money
Charter schools not only give parents a wider range of choices. By drawing students and money out of district schools, they pressure the rest of the system to become more accountable. The public schools are forced to compete for students. For them to recruit effectively, they must have a good product to sell. The presence of competition has been found to lead to significant improvements in reading, writing, and math scores in the public schools.
We see here the age-old idea that the closer decisions are made to the individual, family, and local level, the better those decisions tend to be.
This is why Convention of States is working to create the largest grassroots army in America to return decision-making to the local level…to We the People.
Join our army at Convention of States.
