Education: How we school our children is perhaps the most important issue facing America. It also, disappointingly, gets the least attention. That's why it's been so refreshing to see education front and center at the Republican Convention in Cleveland.
The GOP's 2016 platform has what in today's terms, especially in a world dominated by progressive educators, would be a revolutionary take -- that the duty of educating children should be a parent's responsibility, not the state's. The platform reminds us that the Constitution gives federal government "no role in education." It's not even mentioned.
The platform doesn't mince words, saying that "centralizing forces" -- got that, Common Core advocates? -- that have tried to reform our education system have instead done "immense damage."
And it goes even further, calling for a constitutional amendment to protect parents' rights to decide how their children will be educated -- but it also calls for "parent-driven accountability at every stage of schooling," within a larger framework of local education control.
This is not just angry rhetoric, as defenders of the status quo suggest. Since 1965, the federal government has spent an estimated $2 trillion on elementary and secondary education. In 2012, the most recent year for data, the U.S. spent $12,000 per student in public schools. That's roughly $620 billion total, or more than 4% of our GDP.
Even with the massive amounts spent and the enormous amount of rule-making on the part of the federal government in telling schools what to teach and how, there has been almost no improvement in standardized test scores or in graduation rates. The federal government's involvement in education has been, in short, a failure.
Donald Trump Jr., in his rousing speech on Tuesday night, noted that one of the big reasons why the U.S. lags other nations in K-12 education is because those in those other nations, parents can "choose where to send their own children to school." The 38-year old father of five advocated a free-market fix for what ails schools.
"The other party gave us public schools that far too often fail our students, especially those who have no options," said Trump Jr. "Growing up, my siblings and I, we were truly fortunate to have choices and options that others don't have. We want all Americans to have those same opportunities."
He likened the non-performing, union-dominated U.S. schools to "Soviet-era department stores that are run for the benefit of the clerks and not the customers, for the teachers and administrators and not the students."
Choice is the answer, he said. "That's called competition. It's called the free market. And it's what the other party fears."
Americans recognize that our education system is rotten, wasting billions of dollars, but more tragically, wasting the potential of talented young people. That's especially true of minorities, who are shortchanged the worst. Maybe it's time to try a reform that's never really been tried: Real choice through the free market, based on parents' responsibility for their kids. What a concept.
