Chad Dewey for Liberty

Public schools have long had a stranglehold on tax dollars and the children they have in their district. Don’t like your school? Well, you don’t have many options with public schools. You’re pretty much stuck with the school district your home is in whether you like the school or not. Or are you?

Sadly, I know of a few public schools that focus more on how much money they can get for having a student in their system than what’s best for the students themselves. They’ll push students to be in “special programs”, whether necessary or not, so that they may gain more federal funding for each student in said “special program”. They’ll even go so far as to push you into taking your child to a Doctor to have them evaluated for ADHD, ADD, and several other disorders to justify keeping them in these “special programs”. And when schools like this discover you want to move your student to another school or question their motives? They will do all they can to try to put on the brakes.

On the bright side, parents can choose a charter public school or even a private school…if they can afford it. Unfortunately, public schools have somewhat of a monopoly on tax dollars – the tax dollars set aside to pay for each child to go to public schools don’t follow kids when they move to a private school. Sadly, private schools usually spend less per child and offer a better educational experience than public schools. Don’t get me wrong, I know of several very good local public schools like Bay City Western who not only have student’s best interests in mind, but they’ll do everything they can to assure students are successful for life during and after high school. However, wouldn’t it be nice to have a choice if your local public school wasn’t like Bay City Western?

“What really frightens the conventional public school establishment, however, is not the amount politicians decide to spend on schools, but losing its monopoly on students thanks to other actions the Legislature recently took, namely lifting the cap on the number of charter public schools.” – Michael Van Beek, Michigan Capitol Confidential

Are charter public schools the answer? Are private schools the answer? Is home schooling the answer? I’m not sure anyone has a cut and dry answer for any of those questions. However, why not allow more schools, which allows for more competition and more choices based on the needs of the parents and children?

The purpose of the No Child Left Behind Sunset Act is similar to the Department of Education Abolition Act I wrote up. Both get in the way of educating our children in a way that is beneficial to our children. Because NCLB is creating incentives that can cause the best interests of the students to take a back seat, it needs to be removed from law.

As I had mentioned in the Department of Education Abolition Act, the No Child Left Behind Act has a negative influence on classrooms as the act gives incentives for schools to show increased scores on standardized tests. The problem is, those standardized tests are created by the state and the standards have found to have been lowered so that more students appear to be improving. If a school appears to be doing better, they continue to receive their funding at the federal level. If students do poorly, schools can lose that funding. NCLB also diminishes incentives for more talented, high performing students to exceed any expectations other than the minimum requirements set by NCLB.

This bill sounds a bit scary on the surface. No, it doesn’t mean abolishing schools by any means. What the Department of Education Abolition Act aims to do is remove the federal government bureaucracy from our local classrooms. Let me explain.

Local public schools are funded primarily through millages in your local property taxes and state funding. In a nutshell, the federal government originally created the Department of Education to collect information about schools, take note of the better findings, and give suggestions for improvement. The department didn’t really have much “bite” until it was formally made a Cabinet agency in 1980. Now, mainly because many public schools have accepted federal dollars, the federal government has overstepped it’s role by requiring schools to follow it’s “suggestions”.

For example, the No Child Left Behind Act has a negative influence on classrooms as the act gives incentives for schools to show increased scores on standardized tests. The problem is, those standardized tests are created by the state and the standards have found to have been lowered so that more students appear to be improving. If a school appears to be doing better, they continue to receive their funding at the federal level. If students do poorly, schools can lose that funding. NCLB also diminishes incentives for more talented, high performing students to exceed any expectations other than the minimum requirements set by NCLB.