What is one idea that could quickly have the biggest positive impact on Kentucky’s future?
Sorry to hit you with a big question like that out of the blue, but while you’re thinking about it, I will give you mine and – fair warning – this might take a minute to wrap your head around.
I think the most potent public policy innovation we could enact almost right away is to eliminate all the rules currently limiting teacher certification and put all full-time public school teaching jobs on the ballot in each individual school district for four-year terms.
There are some things government just doesn’t do well by itself and the evidence keeps piling higher to demonstrate that public school teacher certification is a big, expensive one.
And you should care about that because we allowed public schooling to go off the rails so long ago we can’t even see how we went wrong and in ignorance of the issue in its proper context we’ve lost ability to see what is coming next. And if we don’t fix it soon, what is coming next is ugly.
I’m betting you have never heard of the Old Deluder Satan Act of 1647. In the early 1600s, thousands of Puritans fled religious persecution in England, came to America and invented public schooling so people would know how to read the Bible for themselves. In 1647 in Massachusetts colony, the Act mandated creation of public schools for that reason. Rapid general improvement in literacy, productivity and
prosperity ensued.
Public education became a thing in America so people could think for themselves as a protection against tyranny and poverty. This one factor was key in America’s rise to ascendancy in the world.
An important shift happened around World War One, though, as rapid large-scale industrialization introduced a new impatience with hard, slow learning of classical education and becoming independent thinkers in favor of a process to methodically create usefulness.
Critical thinking remains a fashionable term on the surface in education circles, but inarguably the system’s focus has long since shifted from inspiring an ability to ask deep questions to facing forward and quietly following instructions. The worsening student loan crisis, growing underemployment crisis and declining literacy rates contrast starkly for those still capable of critical thinking with rapidly increasing rates of high school graduation.
We could do a lot worse than to just shut down public schools rather than continuing to throw good money after bad, or we could choose to right the ship of public education by removing arbitrary standards of teacher certification and returning accountability to parents and their neighbors interested in reversing our slide into Idiocracy.
If you are still with me or are ready to engage in the lost art of firing off an angry letter to the editor – which would be extremely cool, by the way – the other big issue is teacher pay which we fix by eliminating the schedule of teacher salaries based on seniority in favor of giving principals and/or school boards total discretion in rewarding superior talent with superior pay limited only by available resources and incentivizing inferior classroom occupants to move on with pay cuts. We could combat temptation to wield this power over teacher pay corruptly by making the position of principal an elected office, too.
This push to create a new, unfamiliar voting practice surely seems to be an odd tangent, but it isn’t. Scientific literature has been slow to recognize societal devastation wrecked by the fact that we don’t know our neighbors anymore. Students in classrooms often don’t know the name of the student behind the next desk. Lack of communication with human beings is on the way to becoming an inescapably obvious threat to mental health within a decade. This is a powerful way to fight back against that.
