Education Should Be Local, Not Federal

This was published as a response to a letter to the editor of the Quincy Valley Post-Register.

I want to thank Victor Didra for his bold and passionate assessment of the state of American education in the 26 July 2007 edition of the Quincy Valley Post-Register. As the mother of six, grandmother of ten, the education of children is a priority for me. We have lived in California, Virginia, Colorado, Japan, and Washington. We have experienced public, private, and home schools. We have experienced schooling in small logging and farming communities, in cities such as Los Angeles and Denver, in military and civilian environments. One son and his wife are teachers in Idaho. Other family members and friends have been or currently are teachers. I have worked as an Instructional Assistant, parent volunteer, accreditation committee member, etc. Once I believed that there needed to be a basic unified curriculum that the more transient among us could count on, that would meet the needs of all children but I was wrong. The more unification and federalization, the less freedom good teachers have in the classroom to meet the needs of their individual students, the less time for “practical education” as Victor puts it.
The United States Constitution makes no provision for federalized education. The 10th Amendment states: "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.” In other words, the first step towards improving American education is to abolish the federal Department of Education.
The Washington State Constitution provides for a uniform system of public schools under Article IX, most of which was enacted after 1965, twelve years after the federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare was established through the presidential reorganization authority (which power was never granted by Congress and has since been removed, but the Department remains and is now known as the Education Department).
Article XXVI, Compact with the United States, includes Washington State’s first federal mandate that a public school system free of sectarian influence must be established as a condition of statehood, another violation of the Tenth Amendment.
I would submit that the smallest unit of society, the family, is ultimately responsible for the education of its children. It is in the economic interest of the family to provide education for their own children.
The freedom to choose whether to educate or the method of education must be returned to them. The family must no longer be coerced to pay for two educations, public through forced taxation, and private/home education through tuition.
Next, the local school board should be free to assess the needs of their community and the children who are sent to the public schools. What is best for Seattle, is not always what is best for Quincy. The board should be free to hire and fire teachers without fear of reprisal from unions whose main objective is to gain and hold money and power, not educate children. Scholarships and subscriptions could be set up to help finance children whose families cannot afford the basic public school tuition. Volunteer mentors would have a place and any concerned citizen could contribute funds or time to help.
I don’t believe that the state has any role in educating children other that to insure that no child who wants to attend public school is denied that privilege because of race, creed, color, etc. The city and county could insure the public health and safety of any public building, including schools, and local law enforcement can provide background checks on potential staff, but this would be the extent of their involvement. The state should also stay out of private/home education situations.
The school district that is courageous enough to revamp its philosophy of education to meet the needs of the child rather than the needs of the system will be the successful school district of the future. A return to the classics in the humanities and sciences along with technological advances in virtual reality, computer technology, 3-D modeling software, and the Internet is the synergy needed to enter the 21st century and beyond.