What is Wrong with U.S. Schools?

Our children are outperformed by international peers in core subjects (e.g. reading, math, science). Too many children fail to achieve competency levels in these same subjects (even those who graduate). Something is obviously broken.

What can we do to fix our broken school system?

How did we get the current system?
Our nation was founded on the idea that democracy can only work in a society that is free, moral, and educated. With that core concept in mind the tenth Amendment to our Constitution states that:

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people."

This obviously led to the multitude of local school systems across the United States.

Furthermore, it is an observable fact that "power tends to corrupt" - so unless all of our politicians are perfectly wise and benevolent, then occasionally "bad" people will get elected to positions of authority. Therefore, preventing too much power from being accumulated in any one position is essential to the wellbeing of the nation (the "checks and balances" of our three branches of government).

Since a free, moral, and educated people will not stand for tyranny - a multitude of school systems insures that even if one system goes to pot, that the rest can take steps to compensate (i.e. all of the good apples get a chance to throw out the bad apples). Central control promises to accomplish the same objective, but will simply enable poor systems to stay viable longer.

The real problem
The problem is not that we do not have a "central authority" handing down standards like Moses bringing the Law down from Sinai. The problem is that students can be trapped in a bad system due to geography.

When local control "works," it is responsive to the community. Local school boards that do not engage the community end up with a school system that simply does not function. Poorly functioning schools exercise monopoly power over their customers (i.e. parents and students).

Another problem altogether...
Why is it that two school systems can be in the same area code, but one system sends 95% of their students to colleges and the other sends 5%? There are economic factors at work, but the larger issue is parental expectations. If a child is raised with the expectation that you need to work hard in school, and get training beyond high school in order to earn a decent living, then the child will probably grow up working hard in school and go to college. Obvious, right?

Parents are important to a child's academic achievement. Who would have thought it?

The education "market" and school choice
So now if we have waved our "magic wand" and made every child born into a caring family, who will teach and nurture, the problem of bad school systems becomes very easy to solve. We simply give parents the right to choose where their child goes to school.

School systems that are terrible will suddenly have very few students, incompetent school boards will have very little to do, and children will get the education they need.

Other benefits
In my experience, most teachers go into the profession wanting to teach. They had a great teacher while growing up and sincerely want to help kids. Of course, the little "fiefdoms" established in too many school systems quickly causes disillusion and burnout.

Allowing the free market to punish the incompetent school systems, would result in the well-run systems hiring more teachers. The teaching profession would be dramatically changed (but I doubt if the teachers' unions would be very happy - as this could mean the end of their power).

The one thing our school system does not need is a national bureaucracy handing down unfunded mandates to unmotivated teachers. Yes, our school system should work better. Yes, how to fund all of the local school systems is a big problem. Local control can work if done properly (i.e. the community sees the benefit of investing their money in the school system), but federal control is guaranteed to cost more and provide a lower quality education.

Of course, if your hidden agenda is to secretly "socialize" America (and get rid of that "Constitution" thing that keeps getting in the way of what you really want to do), then getting rid of all those pesky "independent" school boards and creating dependence on federal money is a good first step...