Jump-starting K-12 education reform.

• Author: Bolick, Clint
• Position: Federalist Society National Student Symposium 2016

Our K-12 educational system is a national catastrophe. Many, if not most, of the public schools we think of as good or excellent are in fact, by international comparisons, average or poor. (1) When we compare ourselves to the other Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries that are competitors in the world, we are either at the midpoint or the bottom half of educational performance in every area of education. (2)

The country closest to us in terms of academic performance is Slovakia. (3) I have nothing against Slovakia, but it's Slovakia, and we've got to aspire to be better than Slovakia. The thing about Slovakia is that it spends half as much money on K-12 education per student as the United States, so we pay twice as much to get the same outcome. (4)

Of course, this situation is especially dire for low-income kids. Nearly half of black and Hispanic kids drop out of school before they graduate. (5) Think about that: If you don't even have high school graduation, what are your prospects in life? Even kids from affluent suburban public schools go to college, and the first thing they are required to do there is take remedial English because they are barely literate. (6) And we think that we can take care of these problems with programs like Affirmative Action? As a cab driver once told me, the problem is not in college; the problem is in kindergarten.

All of this is especially perverse, given the fact that we have the capacity in this country right now to deliver a high-quality education, customized to every individual child at a fraction of the cost of which we are providing it. And yet we're not doing that. Many of you are probably familiar with the Khan Academy, (7) the school, so to speak, that takes place entirely over the Internet. (8) It offers free classes in mathematics and sciences and so forth. (9) Thousands if not millions of kids, and for that matter, adults, have learned through the Khan Academy. (10) We have charter schools that are absolutely eye-popping in their success, not just for high-performing students but for low-income kids as well. (11)

A lot of times good-intentioned people say we just need to lower class sizes. (12) We need to send more money to the classroom to facilitate that. (13) Well, when you think about it, what is the ideal student-teacher ratio? Is it 12:1? 15:1? 18:1? What if you have a teacher like Jaime Escalante, possibly the most gifted math teacher in American history? (14) Should he have 18 kids a class? Twenty kids a class? We have the capacity today to deliver that type of education to millions of kids, and yet we're not doing that. The reason we're not doing that is because our education system is a nineteenth-century education system. (15) If Abraham Lincoln were alive today, he would recognize almost nothing about our country. The one thing he would recognize instantly is our schools because they are structured largely the same way they were in the late 1800s, with rows of kids being talked to by their teachers in school districts where they attend school because of their ZIP Code and so forth. (16)

Given the breadth of our education crisis, we have to start asking not whether a particular reform program is too radical, but rather whether it is radical enough. We need a fundamental reconstruction of our K-12 school system, including a devolution of power and resources to the schools and to the families. For instance, why in the twenty-first century do we have school districts? Some of them are so large that they are impermeable bureaucracies. (17) Some are so small that they could not possibly capture economies of scale. (18) They siphon off massive amounts of money without delivering a commensurate educational productivity, (19) they are prone to capture by special interest groups, (20) and they perpetuate funding inequity through property taxes. (21)

We need to think about bold systemic reforms like changing the school district system. One reform in particular has large potential to transform American education: education savings accounts. (22) It is an idea I am proud to say was born in my former organization, the Goldwater Institute, (23) and it was born of...