How Education Savings Accounts Will Revolutionize K-12 Schools
via The Future of School Choice | Hoover Institution.
If you were designing a K-12 education system from scratch, with no preconceived notions, and taking full account of the breathtaking technological innovations that have made possible a high-quality, highly personalized education for every child, what would that system look like?
Chances are that it would look little like the hidebound, bureaucratic, expensive, top-down, one-size-fits-all, command-and-control, inefficient, reform-resistant, administratively bloated, special-interest manipulated, obsolete, impersonal bricks-and-mortar system that represents the most disastrous failure of central planning west of Communist China and south of the United States Postal Service.
And yet, that is the system to which the vast majority of American schoolchildren are consigned. Little wonder that American high schoolers rank 21st out of 30 economically advanced nations in science literacy and 25th in math. Our nation cannot continue to thrive so long as our schools are pumping out mediocre graduates who cannot compete effectively in the world economy.
The proliferation of school choice—through open public school enrollment, magnet schools, charter schools, school vouchers, and scholarship tax credits—has expanded educational opportunities and competition within American K-12 education. Charter schools, in particular, often provide world-class educational programs to a growing number of children, and they sometimes offer individualized, technology-based programs.
But most existing school choice programs provide variations of the same nineteenth-century model that continues to dominate K-12 education: classroom-based instruction in a bricks-and-mortar setting. The school choice programs operate within a system in which the vast majority of funding is directed toward school districts, based on student counts. Charter and voucher programs make that funding transportable to particular types of alternative schools, but do not give families full control of funding to maximize opportunities for their children.
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Related at PJ Lifestyle:
You simply must know the origins of our public school system.
In 1805, Napoleon routed the Prussians at Jena setting off a crisis of confidence. One Prussian in particular, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, believed the fault lay with the fact that the yeoman class was too competent and therefor to independent to properly serve the state. He set about with his new school system to produce “workers who will not strike, citizens who will not revolt, soldiers who will obey orders.”
Among his innovations were class bells to condition you that your time is not your own, grades to teach that your work was for the approval of your betters and deserving of no more than arbitrary and valueless response, homework to demonstrate the ability of the state to intrude on personal time, rows and columns of desks to enforce a sense of isolation within regimentation, schoolyards arranged so that there is no place to escape scrutiny, and, most importantly, an arbitrary and fragmented curriculum that taught no processes start-to-finish in order to avoid conferring actual marketable skills.
The Realschule for the children of the aristocracy remained the same, but Fichte’s Volkschule opened in 1814 (?) and remained the model of German education, one of the reasons Fichte is widely considered the Ur-Vater of Naziism. When German universities began handing out doctorates in the mid-1800s, among those who traveled there were many Americans including Horace Mann, who reviewed the Volkschule and decided it was just the thing to import back home.
He tried peddling this concept to communities but they preferred to stick with the American Little Red Schoolhouse egalitarian style of education. So he began lobbying with state legislatures promising to solve “the immigrant problem.” This worked, and we still have this wretched monstrosity to this day.
My wife and I paid handsomely for our sons to attend one of the few remaining schools modeled on the Little Red Schoolhouse approach, and it made all the difference.
Thank you Charlie, for starting the story. Horace Mann visited Prussian schools and reported back the Boston and New York that they needed to follow that model. Those cities were being overwhelmed by Catholic Irish and Italian children, and needed to do something. Horace did visit Prussia and toured the schools, but during the summer. He never witnessed an actual classroom with real students and a teacher, in session. In the late 1800′s German political conflicts led to many of their socialists being kicked out of the country. They came here and have made our academia a bastion of liberal-socialism-Marxism. Besides, any institution like our schools come to be more interested in serving the school and it’s employees than the students.
When we removed the indigenous peoples, our system of financing schools with local property taxes made sense. We need to reconsider that financing.
I cannot believe in this day and age we allow our state legislators to force us pay for public schooling our children while we are required to simultaneously pay for private schooling, if we choose that!
Did we not pay into an education fund our entire working lives? Did our spouse not pay into that same fund? Who are these people that deny us our right to choose a school for our children and deny us our right to those funds we paid in?
Who are these people? Democrats. Leftists. Socialists. Work to remove them.
—- Little wonder that American high schoolers rank 21st out of 30 economically advanced nations in science literacy and 25th in math
Unless the 20 schools above us have a free market school system, this is a spurious argument and a statistic I have never believed anyway.
And I say that as an advocate for free market schools.