Education is a Winner

We have to champion students and teachers; Teacher unions do neither.

Conservatives finally see the white whale in front of them. Education is a winning issue not just for conservatives, but for children too. Conservatives have the right message: empower parents, reduce burden on teachers, abolish unions, remove bureaucracy, and move away from standardized tests. If teacher pay increases are also in the discussion, it is hard to argue against any of this. Conservatives need to champion education. The funny thing is, many liberals agree, too. In fact, if you take the words liberal and conservative out of the conversation, a lot of agreement can be found. At the end of the day, the goal should be to have reading and culturally literate children who all have a similar basic knowledge of reading, writing, math, science, and history. Right now a majority of Americans are not happy with public education. Only 9% are completely satisfied. Here are the reforms we all need to promote.

Empowering parents is central. Essential to that is school choice. Parents need the power to choose where their children go to school. Right now, mostly the wealthy have a choice in where their children attend school. Instead of being stuck in a specific school, parents should be trusted with their child’s education. Also important, is localizing control and accountability. We need to remove the obstacles for teachers to teach and for parents to influence schools. Most administrators need to go, which would relieve teachers and parents from long lines of bureaucratic paper pushers. School funding should depend on enrollment, not zip code or property tax district. If a school attracts students, it receives state funding. The market can help elevate students and teachers alike. See Arizona, the latest state to empower parents and localize control. Arizona will allocate $6,500/child for parents to direct to the school of their choice. It is the logical next step for other states to follow.

School choice is a political winner, too. The last legislative session in Texas saw 22 republicans vote against school choice. The last election saw only 6 of them get renominated. School choice politicians are getting elected in face-offs where education is the central topic.

Abolish teachers unions. 2020 and 2021 proved they work against children and only serve political goals. Keeping schools closed during COVID was shameful and a proven disaster. European schools operated just fine in 2020, while many children in the USA were held hostage by the unions as pawns in their political battle. They want us to forget what they did to our children over the past few years.

Ingrid Jacques at USA Today put it very well:

People on the political right are often derided as science deniers and for doubting the guidance of public health experts, but the scientific guidance was firmly on the side of getting kids back to school – until teachers unions got involved. Emails leaked last year showed how union influence directly changed CDC guidance at several points. It turns out that the $40 million in union donations to Joe Biden and other Democrats bought them a seat at the “science” table…

Similarly, the National Education Association helped influence the CDC’s tightened recommendations on masking, forcing children to mask up last school year, long after many Americans had ditched face coverings in public places.

Teacher unions were also instrumental in the Justice Department declaring PTA moms as terrorists. They funnel taxpayer money to political pet projects, like reintroducing racial discrimination, or promoting gender dysphoria. I argue teacher unions should be abolished. Each state with teacher unions need to introduce legislation that has two major clauses: 25% pay raise and abolishing teacher unions. The average teacher pay should be $100,000/yr (the 2022 average is just under $62,000/yr). Teacher unions have clearly failed to achieve anything anywhere close to that. Instead, their effort has focused on closing schools, gender and race politics, and insulating bad teachers from being fired.

Teacher unions are not good for teachers. Mike Lilley in Discourse:

Three-quarters of the top executives were hired from the ranks of political operatives. They organize teachers and allies for political action, lobby the state government and the Legislature, and back candidates for office. Half of teachers’ dues are now spent on political activities. This shift has served very well the people who run the union—they enjoy lucrative compensation packages and gold-plated pensions…

Teachers are also ill-served by their forced participation in a rigid, union-enforced pay structure that treats them like assembly-line workers rather than professionals. There is no escape from the salary guides designed to benefit older, career teachers, the core constituency of any teachers union…

The situation is much the same around the country. In state after state with strong teachers unions, members pay high dues, suffer from back-end-loaded salary structures, and hold pensions that are grossly underfunded.

Pay structures based on seniority are bad for good teachers and completely leave out an amazing group of potential educators: retired industry experts.

Remove standardized tests. College entrance exams make sense, but putting elementary school aged children through day long exams does no good. It promotes teaching to the exam, not sustaining a joy for lifetime learning. Parents can’t be squishy about this anymore. Standardized exams failed. Parents need to defend their children and have a voice in saying no to these exams. Teachers and schools see the development of students throughout the year and best understand their progress. They are better equipped to communicate to parents where the child needs help and where they excel. Play needs to be emphasized and testing greatly decreased. However, the opposite is the trend in America. NPR reported this telling statistic about kindergartners:

In 2010, 73 percent of kindergartners took some kind of standardized test. One-third took tests at least once a month. In 1998, they didn't even ask kindergarten teachers that question. But even the first-grade teachers in 1998 reported giving far fewer tests than the kindergarten teachers did in 2010.

With larger rates of anxiety and depression being reported among our kids, you have to wonder if there is at least some link between higher stress environments in school being more common. Testing is just one piece of that, but elementary school is not a place for rigor. It is place for incubating a joy of learning. It is a place for discovery, imagination, play, and social learning. Yes, reading and math need to be included, but worked around and integrated into play at young ages. If a school is healthy, teachers are able to provide the feedback to parents about their children to monitor progress. If a school is unhealthy, standardized tests are tools used to provide cover. Even if poor scores come in, schools simply hire consultants and pressure teachers and students more. Which leads me to one of the more important changes needed.

Teachers need to be able to have control over their lesson plans and stop being given unnecessary paperwork. Let them teach as they know best. Micromanaging teachers is soul crushing. They should be in charge of two things: educating and promoting a joy of learning. They are not there to promote social change. We need to stop foisting all these programs and campaigns on them because we know they have access to developing minds. That is manipulation and opportunism. Having access to students needs to be respected and not used as a political tool. There needs to be minimal constraints on teachers for them to effectively promote a joy of learning. A joyful teacher is very effective in creating joyful students. So many teachers join the profession with joyful hearts, only for their spirits to be crushed by high expectations, little support, and debilitating constraints placed on them by the administration and government. We need to remove the bureaucracy, remove teacher unions, and set the teachers free.

Additionally, no teacher should make less than $60,000/yr. Average pay needs to be about $100,000/yr. Advanced degrees should not be required, as it puts overeducated elites at the helm of classrooms - the ones most likely to push political agendas. A teacher should simply be able to demonstrate knowledge of the material and show genuine care and competency, no matter the formal education level.

Phone free schools help our kids and teachers. Students need to be completely phone free during school hours. They should not be used in class, between classes, or at lunch. Kids spend 3.5 hours a day on social media. There are larger cultural issues at play here with real questions on what any government can or should do about this problem. However, a clear ability for action exists in our schools. Lock up student phones at school.

Emphasize skills and trades. Every student needs to develop skills while attending school. Musical instruments, shop class, sports, cooking, art, debate, theatre, and countless other skills, subjects, and trades give students the ability to accomplish something valuable for themselves and others. These skills help them enter the world with something to offer. Aside from an ability to make a living, this gives students and opportunity to build self-worth outside social media.

Teachers are not therapists. Teachers have essentially been deputized as therapists. We need to end this practice immediately since it is proven to exasperate mental health problems, not treat them. Daniel Buck summarizes Abigail Shrier’s Bad Therapy well:

Wellness checks may worsen depression or anxiety. Healthy introspection can quickly spiral into a toxic dwelling on negativity, and the best therapies train patients out of these loops of reflection. Few of us are happy all the time, and daily wellness checks or restorative circles keep the difficulties of life ever present in a student’s mind…

If every child receives regular questionnaires inquiring into their mental state, we risk pathologizing the slings and arrows of daily life. A kid who’s down after a rough day suddenly shows “depressive symptoms.” Nervousness before a test is now “anxiety.” These designations are stultifying, fatalistic even…

Intensive counseling works well for individuals with genuine diagnoses, but we seem to be expecting teachers and school staff to implement therapy-like practices into their classrooms. It’s an error akin to recognizing that chemotherapy works well for cancer patients, and so teachers should administer small doses to all children.

We cannot allow our teachers to take on this responsibility. It hurts the kids and there is no way teachers have the time or attention needed to do this well when they are pulled in many directions and responsible for 30 children in a classroom.