Ceding Education to the Professionals

In recent times, education has increasingly become dominated by highly trained professional educators and administrators.  There is always someone who knows best on how to teach, how to run a school, and also what is important to teach.  The community or family is now completely left out of these processes and decisions.

It is true that there are curriculum review boards for local school district, where parents volunteer to review curricula and make recommendations.   And yet, the curricula is always pre-filtered to those choices which meet standards that are set by other agencies, written by highly educated professionals.

It is also true that parents can run for school board, and thereby have an influence on the operations of the school.  There may be a few examples where a few highly-dedicated school board members are able to transform a school with very poor academic achievement into a high achieving school.  The challenge is that there are just too many different stakeholders involved in a public school for that one parent, not matter how dedicated, to make a real and tangible difference on the school board.

Our institutions have grown far too complex over time, too calcified with regulations, too enamored with education expertise and too reliant of standards to deliver exceptional education.  The only path forward is to restore the responsibility of education to the primary stakeholders, the families who seek their children to be educated.