Back To School Shopping Should Include The School

by Jack VanNoord

It's time for back to school shopping. As my wife and I prepare to send our daughter to kindergarten, we just finished up school shopping of a different sort. We were literally SHOPPING for a school.  We looked at District 300 schools, Immanuel Lutheran School in East Dundee, Westminster Presbyterian School in Elgin and a few others. After inventorying our goals and desires for our daughter, my wife and I went looking for the school that would best continue the education we have started in the home. I wish it were a process that every parent went through.

Empowering parents through vouchers or tax credits to choose the school that best meets their child's needs would dramatically transform education as we know it. Schools, wanting to attract students --and their accompanying educational dollars-would have to be able to demonstrate success. Furthermore, schools would emerge to fulfill the incredibly varied needs of children. Educational diversity would abound.

Educational policy would no longer be set by a few elected school board members. Parents would go from having little control to having complete control. They would vote with their feet. Education would be de-politicized.

If parents were given educational choice, every school would hang a shingle out front declaring what they do and how they go about doing it.

Does the school use phonics or a whole language approach to reading? Does the nurse's office hand out condoms? Does the school have a public prayer at football games? Do classrooms emphasize group work or individual work? Does the school offer all-girl class? All-boy? Does the sex ed program teach abstinence? Does the school have multi-age classes? Uniforms? Does the school purport to teach morality? Does the school teach evolution? Creationism?

Schools that did not provide the environment and opportunities that parents want for their children would soon find themselves without students. Those schools that provided the education that parents want would flourish.
 
The free market -namely competition-- has given us wide selection and high quality in the cars, food and clothes we buy. That same variety, innovation and value would exist in education if we treated parents more like consumers by giving them school choice.

Instead we have settled for second best in this country. We have a monolithic, government-run education system that inevitably leads to one-size-fits-all mediocrity.

In California, the entire state lost a generation of readers in the 1980's because a group of educational elites managed to persuade the California legislature to mandate that all government-run schools in California must use something called a whole language approach to reading. A decade later, realizing their error, the legislature mandated that all reading programs must have a phonics component. What a disastrous way to set educational methodology.
 
Whole language. Phonics. Open classrooms. Back to basics. Old math. New math. What is the one best way? When we have entire states --or even entire school districts-- deciding what education should look like, they are declaring that they have ascertained the ONE RIGHT WAY.
 
This fall, all parents should have the opportunity to shop not only for the jeans, notebooks and backpacks that are right for their children, they should also be freed to choose the school that is right for them. But not every parent can afford to pay -via taxes-- for a seat in a government-run school that his child will never occupy and then pay the tuition at the school he really wants his child to attend.
 
My wife and I are part of the minority who is able to do so. So on September 1st I will join the disproportionately large number of public school teachers who do not send their kids to the public schools. Maybe we know something about the limitations of public education that the rest of the public doesn't.

08-15-2001

Written by Jack VanNoord - West Dundee.