As excited as I am about the election results last night, I want to remind parents how little will actually be solved legislatively, or politically (almost nothing). There are, in fact, only a few things that can be done through these means to improve education in America:

• A new presidential administration could (and SHOULD) abolish the Dept. of Education.
  People would freak out, and claim there's no way to fund entitlements like IDEA, but the answer should be that IDEA isn't enforced from the federal gov't anyway, and each state is well within its rights to establish its own laws concerning FAPE, and their own funding rules FOR it. The only reason the funding came from the federal gov't was that the federal gov't mandated the states provide services to special needs kids, but without enforcement and oversight, the money went out, and the kids didn't get served anyway. Keeping it local gives any program a better chance of working in the first place. As it is now, districts spend millions on lawyers defending themselves in lawsuits filed by parents, and those are the parents with means to sue. Most don't. So what will we do without them? No worse, how's that?

• State Legislators and Governors can pass laws allowing education dollars to follow students. Yes, there would be more demand than supply for schools, but not for long. What's more, parents would feel less inhibited about homeschooling if they weren't leaving money on the table.

• Teachers Union members should be banned from serving on school boards, on city councils and county commissions, and on the BOE. The conflict of interest is OBVIOUS.

• Legislation could mandate that ALL curriculum selections should be available for public review for at least 60 days prior to voting/adoption, and research -- produced by objective third parties, NOT the curriculum developers -- should be made available to taxpayers at the same time. NO curriculum should be considered that is not supported by this type of evidence. Also, in conjunction with the proposal to the public for the adoption of the curriculum, the Board should cite the specific metrics and rubrics that would be used to evaluate its success or failure, what outcome it's aiming to promote or improve, and why it was chosen vs other contenders for the same purpose.

Would most parents ignore all this? Yup, and that kinda pisses me off, but it doesn't change the fact that it should be produced and made available.

• Schools should be mandated to use books and other low-tech materials k-5, and not move to keyboarding and tablets until all students are proficient at reading books, and handwriting. "Partnerships" with tech companies to provide ed-tech in the classroom should be limited and justified using something other than "Hey, kids need to be ready for the 21st Century." Hate to break it to you, but even here in the 21st C, we need to read, and write, and spell, and function without a damn DEVICE in our hand at all times. I know kids in middle school who can't sign their own NAMES, even in print.

This is a list of the types of things that could be done using legislative or political pressure and accountability --there are more, like stop using property taxes to fund education, switch to opt-in payment as if it's a public option, let parents just keep their taxes if they opt out. This cuts down on the taxpayer cost of administration for the "money follows the kids" feature of real educational freedom b/c they're only bookkeeping for those who opt in, not collecting from all, and refunding to those who opt-out.

These things ought to be done because they're morally right, but I am under no illusion that they will fix public education. It's unfixable, and that's why I'm sharing this article. Read it, and tell me how exactly electing better Governors and representatives, or even a new president, will make a DENT in this problem?

https://quillette.com/2021/11/03/the-demoralization-of-the-american-teacher/