Increasing Educational Innovation and Opportunity

Statement

Americans are dedicated to the principle that where you start out in life shouldn't determine where you end up. The great American story since even before the founding of our republic has been about individuals who overcame the odds to succeed in life.

Education has always been essential to that success. In 1870, the first formal federal survey of education in the U.S. showed that 7 million children were in elementary schools but only 80,000 were in secondary schools. This would change dramatically over the coming decades.

Now, a secondary school education is considered to be just the beginning for most students. It has to be considering the complexity of future jobs. There are fewer jobs every year that require only a basic level of skill. While blue collar manufacturing jobs used to be filled by men and women with low educational achievement, industrial jobs increasingly require complex math skills. Many manufacturers are actually finding it hard to find workers with the right skills and are investing in training programs to help workers who show potential.

Both my wife and I were educators. I taught math and science at public high schools both before and after my time serving in the Air Force. Free public education transformed American education. In 1870, just over one percent of students went on to secondary school. Today, pretty much every student in America goes past elementary school.

While we've had historic success, we don't compete with our past. American students compete with their peers across the globe. Since the early 1970s, the rate of Americans graduating from high school has stagnated. While college attendance continued to climb, more and more students have needed to take remedial classes to catch up.

The poor quality of too many public schools has led to a surge in the number of charter schools. Indeed, the demand for these schools far outstrips the space they have available. Eighty percent of charter schools have students on a waiting list. The average size of these waiting lists is 214 students. Nationwide, that makes for more than one million children wanting to get into a charter school.

Little wonder that there is such demand since charter schools typically are more responsive to parents. The entrenched bureaucracy of large public school systems doesn't have to pay much attention to individual students and parents, kids get left behind all the time.

Today, big time decisions about how kids get educated are made far above the heads of parents. No Child Left Behind--which I voted against even though it was a Republican initiative--and Common Core have been directed from Washington and state capitols. The wishes of parents are an afterthought.

When comedian and parent Louis C.K. recently took to Twitter to discuss the difficulties his children have faced with new Common Core math problems, one of the academic creators of the initiative blasted him as ill-informed.

The voice of one parent doesn't matter much to distant education researchers. By contrast, the voice of one parent does matter at many charter schools, where the leadership has the ability to respond and think about the needs of individual students.

While Democrats and Republicans have disagreements about how far government should go to support charter schools, there is broad agreement that they are a worthwhile innovation. The House of Representatives recently passed bipartisan legislation to support the growth of successful charter schools.

The Success and Opportunity Through Quality Charter Schools Act promotes state efforts to develop and expand charter schools. It also focuses on supporting the expansion and replication of successful charter models. The bill supports the sharing of best practices between public and charter schools so that both models can help improve each other. Finally, the bill encourages charters to reach out to children with disabilities and English learners, populations that often have little choice in schooling.

Charter schools aren't for every child, and not every charter school is created equally. We shouldn't give up on public schools, but we should promote more innovation and encourage more local control. Parents care far more than bureaucrats, academics, or legislators. Giving them the biggest say in their children's education is the best thing we can do.

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