A child’s most impressionable years are spent in a public school under the supervision of adults employed by the government. And now we have learned that too many of those teachers, principals and administrators are lying about test scores and cheating their students.
Routine cheating conducted in schools by adults who set an example for the next generation may be a very real and troubling problem from coast to coast, according to a fascinating investigation published by the AJC.
Of course long lines of “experts” declaring they know why this happened are jumping to blame everyone from former President George W. Bush to education reformers and those who insist on testing students to ensure they are learning.
Others say it’s the fault of schools that retain teachers who are incompetent to help students learn the basics such as reading and writing. Georgia’s dismal SAT scores and its graduation rate — 49th in the nation — are evidence that job retention is not tied to performance.
While everyone is pointing fingers, the truth is there is way too much attention put on the providers of education — by which testing is the means to measure student success. We as taxpayers keep trying to make sure we are getting our money’s worth from government schools. Testing also gives parents the information they need to discover whether their children are learning, and that is important.
But as a society, we can blame ourselves for this culture that has led to systemic cheating. We have accepted a system of education that does not allow parents to have the ultimate accountability. Instead, we have ceded our authority over our own children to government bureaucrats.
To restore true accountability, we should focus on the customers of education — children and their parents — and allow parents to have more freedom to choose where they want to send their child to school. Parents should be the ones providing accountability, and the only way they can exercise that is with the ability to put their child in the school of their choice.
With educational freedom — and educational dollars following the child — educators, principals and bureaucrats wouldn’t be fixated on the system and how to make it suit them. They would be focused on how to keep their students from leaving by delivering a better product.
Cheating is a symptom of a dysfunctional educational system. Until we look in the mirror and take personal responsibility for each child, and demand that each parent have the sole right to determine his or her child’s education and not the government, we will see more big government ideas twisted to benefit adults at the expense of children.
Leslie Hiner is vice president of the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice.
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