Students, not failing schools, should be the ones receiving funding | Opinion
Jason Peirce
Recent guest columnist Adam Bryn Tritt's use of Thomas Jefferson to make his case that public schools and the education system exist for "the collective benefit" of our "country and democracy," and "not for the children" and their parents, is wrong-headedly backwards.
Fact is, Jefferson and his fellow Founding Fathers founded the United States on the idea of individual liberty. Logically therefore, this country exists to uphold the individual liberty of the individuals comprising it, not any other way around, and certainly not the way Tritt would have it, which assumes we the people exist for the country, and government.
Indeed, Jefferson believed education was vital for the "general diffusion of knowledge" necessary for a free society to remain free.
But unlike the bloated, massively inefficient public education bureaucracy we have today, Jefferson advocated for a radically decentralized system of small "districts of five or six miles square" at most. Even state-controlled systems were too large for Jefferson, who cautioned that schools would "be badly managed" and "depraved by abuse" to bankruptcy, if state governments managed the education of their citizens.
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Furthermore, it was Jefferson who influenced his protégé Joseph Cabell's 1817 Virginia Assembly vote against the "Mercer Plan," which was designed to give enormous power over education to the state government. Notably, Jefferson "expressed both fear and scorn when contemplating a centralized state authority in education." As Jefferson wrote to Cabell in 1817:
"What has destroyed liberty and the rights of man in every government which has ever existed under the sun? The generalizing and concentrating all cares and powers into one body, no matter whether of the autocrats of Russia or France, or the aristocrats of a Venetian Senate."
Given, Jefferson would abhor today's federal Department of Education (DoED), founded in 1979, as well as many state and district education bureaucracies. For one, there's no constitutional authority for the federal government to involve itself in education, in the first place. Beyond that, there's zero evidence the DoED has helped improve U.S. education over the last four-plus decades. In fact, the U.S. has come to fall far behind that of other developed nations.
Furthermore, many districts around the U.S. are mired in dangerous, abject failure (including drugs and violence). For example, in one Baltimore, Maryland, district, 77% of high school students read on an elementary school level, and only 1.9% read at grade level. Clearly, U.S. education policy makers have failed to heed Jefferson's warnings.
But let us now circle back to Tritt's assertion that parents should have little say over the management of their children's education ("public schools… are not for the parents").
Jefferson held the complete opposite view. He believed school management by "any authority of the government, than by the parents within each ward … is a belief against all experiences."
Jefferson was equally clear regarding his feelings on compulsory education, of which Tritt seems to favor (as he implies that all citizens exist for and belong to the "country"). To wit, Jefferson thought it better to err on the side of no education, than forced education:
"It is better to tolerate the rare instance of a parent refusing to let his child be educated, than to shock the common feelings and ideas by the forcible transportation and education of the infant against the will of the father."
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Of course, all of the above eviscerates Tritt's central argument, and renders his subsequent assumptions ludicrous
But the great lesson here can be built off of Tritt's conclusive suggestion that if parents don't like what's happening in public schools, they should try private education options (yes, here, it's clearly lost on Tritt that he's upended his own argument.
Indeed, parents should be allowed to seek whatever education options they deem best for their children. And for starters, they should be able to take all public education dollars available with them, to whatever school they choose. This is school choice, what many now call the "civil rights issue of our time." School choice would fund students, not failing systems, while breeding competition in education, bringing quality up, and costs down. It would also provide a boon to the education job market
Furthermore, if it it's accountability in education we're looking for, nothing would hold schools more accountable than the knowledge that if students and parents are not happy, they can take their education dollars elsewhere. (School choice is also the issue which swept Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis into office, as 100,000 Black mothers voted for DeSantis on the issue, as he won by 32,463 votes).
Vitally, school choice would end the growing conflict we see across the nation, between students and parents rights groups, and school boards over contentious issues like mask mandates, critical race theory, and LGBTQ+ issues.
As public education is right now, students, parents, and taxpayers are certainly not getting what we're paying for. We are already failing our children and country, and greater failure and conflict is inevitable until we embrace school choice, for starters.
Given his very own words, Thomas Jefferson would be the first to agree.
Jason Peirce lives in Melbourne and has children in Brevard Public Schools. He's a regular contributor to The Federalist.
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