National Education Association member Rachelle Moore inadvertently made the case for numerous school options on Tuesday while testifying before the Senate education committee.
“We also need to consider the unique challenges and circumstances of each student’s life,” Moore said in her oral testimony before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. “There is no way to measure the intangibles in a student’s life. There is no ‘average’ student. Each student is shaped by individual experiences. And those experiences must be taken into consideration when shaping policies geared towards improving student success.”
Moore is absolutely right. Every student is different. It’s time for education policy to acknowledge that by increasing opportunities for school choice.
The NEA opposes many forms of school choice, including school vouchers, portable funding, and virtual learning. To their credit, the NEA appears to be tolerant of some charter schools (although teachers’ unions often oppose their expansion) and supportive of magnet schools. Alone, these schools are a good start when it comes to expanding school choice. But they are not enough.
Ideally, schooling options would be as diverse as the students they intend to serve. When students have a choice — whether between two schools or two hundred — the competition will sharpen all of the schools to educate students more effectively.
“There’s a lot more that needs to be done so every child in this country truly has a robust menu of educational options,” Andrew Campanella, the president of National School Choice Week, told the Washington Examiner. “School children are not cookie-cutter and neither should their educational experiences be.”
Moore also inadvertently made the case for reducing schools’ dependence on the federal government. She stressed the importance of listening to teachers’ voices when deciding where federal funding should be directed. Those voices are loudest at the local level, where teachers have direct contact with school and district administrators. The needs of teachers vary greatly across the country, and a federal bureaucracy cannot realistically meet those diverse needs.
Schools that are not government-run can better serve students if they operate without worrying about the many layers of government education mandates. This allows non-government-run schools to focus on what’s actually important — students — and not get distracted by bureaucracy.
