Shennell McCloud is CEO of Project Ready, a Newark-based nonprofit that works to increase voting in the city. She’s also the author of a New Jersey Star-Ledger guest column, Our Kids Can’t Read But Voters Can Change That Tomorrow. Her pitch to parents whose kids’ school is grossly failing them is, vote.
The headline, of course, is highly misleading (to put it mildly). Written on April 24, 2023—the day before the election—McCloud implies that the long-running problem of disastrously bad reading skills can be fixed overnight. This, of course, is nonsense.
It is a moral crime to tell parents that the solution to the crappy schools their kids are forced into is to vote in new school board members—and then tell them to send their kids back to the same crappy schools and, don’t worry, things will be better—some day.
Parents have waited in vain for decades. Parents don’t need another election. They need the freedom to pull their kids, and their kids’ education dollars, and “vote” with their choice. “Your kids can’t read, so vote” is a cruel joke. The charter school option—which, interestingly, isn’t mentioned by McCloud despite its stunning success—is a good start, but it’s too narrow. Every parent should have the freedom to redirect education tax dollars to the educational option of their choice, including homeschooling. They already have the moral right. They should have the legal right.
We need a new Civil Rights Movement. The first got rid of slavery. The second got rid of Jim Crow. We need a third—to get rid of the government school monopoly and give every parent, in every district, the right of school choice—real school choice, where education tax dollars fund the child, not the government-assigned school district.
How many decades of failure will we have to endure before we realize that no election and no school board will be able to fix anything. The problem runs too deep. It involves education philosophy, curriculum control, teacher training, teacher union political power, compulsory school attendance laws, taxes. The local public school that the child steps into is the last step. It’s merely the symptom.
I don’t mean to demonize the electoral process. Certainly, it’s necessary in the current government school system, and critically important to a free society. But voting is a derivative right that should never supersede parents’ inalienable rights. And parents shouldn’t escape responsibility, either. They can minimize the damage by circumventing the public schools. In his book Why Johnny Still Can't Read or Write or Understand Math: And What We Can Do About It, Philosopher and educator Andrew Bernstein describes the many ways parents can improve their child’s education, especially in basic areas like reading. But parents can only do so much, and should have much more control.
But the fact is, the public school system cannot be reformed. It is an “impregnable fortress” run by an “interlocking directorate” empowered by government force, just like slavery and forced segregation was. The fortress needs to be disempowered, and the parents empowered.
The public school system has been around for a century and a half. It must be said. It must be acknowledged. The government run and financed public school system has had its chance and it has failed. It’s time for a fully competitive, entrepreneur driven school system that does what every market-oriented economic sector does—puts consumers in charge. The parents are the consumers of education. It’s time we gave them the respect and power to exercise that role.
Related Reading:
Parents’ School Choice Rights Shouldn't Depend on Winning Elections
A Newark, NJ Mother Demonstrates the Educational Power of Parental School Choice
Toward a Free Market in Education: School Vouchers or Tax Credits?
Newark's Successful Charter Schools Under Attack—for Being Successful
Contra Congressman Donald M. Payne, a ‘For-Profit Model’ is Just What Education Needs
Real School Choice Depends on Free Exercise of Individual Rights
Voting Rights are Not the ‘Most Fundamental Right’—or Even a Fundamental Right
The Educational Bonanza in Privatizing Government Schools—Andrew Bernstein for The Objective Standard
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