What to Expect from President Trump on Education

The American public education system is not going to be destroyed by the President Trump administration as the left claims, it will instead be restructured to become competitive by world standards.  The federal Department of Education has become an overbearing, centralized bureaucracy imposing a one-size-fits-all educational recipe on every state.  This administration will begin by cutting this bureaucracy down to size and returning power and funding back to the states so they can continue to be the laboratories of democracy they were always intended to be.

A constructive restructuring of the public school system should start by eliminating the funding reliance on local property taxes that provide good schools for the wealthy and substandard schools for the poor.  Equal funding for all students should instead come from government general funds, and the allotted amount for each student should be portable in the form of school vouchers.  Parents should decide where their children attend school, not fixed zip code assignments and school vouchers should be permitted for use in private, even religious schools.

All public schools should gradually become privately administered as chartered schools without the stranglehold of the teachers' union.  Their individual survival should depend on their ability to attract students with government-funded vouchers.  These privately administered chartered schools, like other private schools, should be able to hire, reward, or fire teachers based on merit evaluation, without seniority or tenure rights.  They should also be able to expel disruptive or non-performing students thereby maintaining a disciplined environment conducive to proper learning.  Students with learning disabilities requiring special education should have their own school programs that do not interfere with the mainstream curriculum.

A second-tier public school system will, by necessity, emerge to collect disruptive or non-performing students expelled from other schools. These schools of last resort would need to have a heavy security presence and vigorous remediation support programs. Students who show desired behavior modification will always have the opportunity to return to chartered or private schools. Our philosophy should always be to try to leave no child behind while assuring that disruptors are not allowed to hold another student behind.

The present American public school system costs more than in other industrialized countries and has dismal comparative results; it has to change, and change is on the way.

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