How Airline Apathy Explains the Need for School Choice

April 9, 2017

If you’ve ever been stranded at an airport — or gotten involved in a debate over school choice — you can certainly empathize with Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at AEI.

In a sarcastic and slightly cranky opinion piece, Hess details a bad stroke of luck with American Airlines that ultimately prevents him from delivering an important lecture despite trying every maneuver possible to rebook flights, book car rentals, and hightail it through an airport.

So I bolted off the plane, asking the ‘helpful’ lady guiding us to our transfer gates to please just let the gate know I was coming (she said she would). I didn’t make it. Well, by dashing up and down escalators and such, I actually made it there just in time, barely 10 minutes before departure—but the agent had already closed the door and was nowhere to be found. The idle American agent at the gate 20 feet over didn’t much care, even though an impartial third party might’ve thought I merited at least a modicum of consideration—given that I’d spent a big chunk of my day trying to juggle air reservations and rental car plans to accommodate American’s struggles.”

This kind of experience, unfortunately, isn’t all that rare. Travelers get the raw end of the deal at the mercy of airlines all of the time – even though they are paying for their airline ticket and trusting said airline with delivering them in a safe and timely manner.

So why is Hess’ experience important?

Because he makes an analogy that is an excellent window into the experience of many parents when it comes to their children being stranded in a school system that drops the ball time and time again. Only with education, the stakes are much, much higher, as Hess notes.

I’m annoyed today less because my flights were goofed up (which happens), and more because no one who works for the airline seems especially interested in doing anything about it. I would feel infinitely more chipper if I felt like someone really wanted to help ensure that the problem got solved. Instead, I’m staring at the face of a big, bureaucratic morass, a face which displays a remarkable lack of passion for doing the job well.

This happens time and again when it comes to big bureaucracies. Nobody seems all that concerned about helping out, preferring instead to spout lots of stuff about policy and procedure. We can never get hold of anyone who really seems to be in charge, and it can feel like the whole process is devoid of accountability or genuine human concern.

This frustration is at the heart of the school choice debate.

The bureaucracy of public education has been attacked and debated for years. There’s no changing that. And with bureaucracies of all kinds being laden with deficiencies, it’s not a surprise that education is also a victim.

As Ronald Reagan so aptly noted,

Every once in a while, somebody has to get the bureaucracy by the neck and shake it loose and say ‘stop what you’re doing.’

But it’s important that we not throw our hands up and end on a pessimistic, fatalistic view of education. The variable that Hess highlights is crucial to understanding the motive of school choice advocates – and the ability to improve Big Education by employing educators who work with passion and purpose. It’s not a question of for-profit motives, it’s about finding “smaller, more human-sized” school systems:

Hess is a physical traveler just as all parents navigate schools in the hopes of providing the best education possible to their children. If he had been given some semblance of genuine effort to help him reach his destination, Hess could have made his flight. Or even if he didn’t, he could have walked away knowing the best attempt was made by American Airlines to uphold their end of the deal.

That’s not asking too much, is it?

Likewise for parents, school children ought to be given every opportunity to receive the best education, not just the one they are stuck in because that’s where Mom or Dad pays rent or their mortgage. When kids are not afforded that opportunity because the bureaucratic mess of Big Education gets in the way and their education fails them, Mom and Dad become cranky too. Or downright angry, and justifiably so. Because we all know how important education is for setting a child up to pursue happiness and success.

What we all want, I think, in an airline—and a hundred times more in a school—is that professionals exhibit a passion for doing their job well. For figuring out smart ways to solve problems. For execution.

As for the children who’ve had the benefit of school choice, but still fail? Well at least they had access to their best shot. Just as flights will be missed, children will fail. There are countless reasons why. But having the confidence that every effort was made on his or her behalf is a whole lot more palatable than watching employee after employee halfheartedly clock in and out with no desire to help you reach your final destination.

Filed Under: Education, Happiness Tagged With: , , , ,

Education Department Employee Mantras to Save The Children

January 4, 2017

With every presidential election comes a discussion about the abolition of unpopular federal agencies. Usually the Environmental Protection Agency and the Education Department are at the top of the list.

But with each new administration, the federal bureaucracy revs up to go full tilt. With President-elect Donald Trump’s selection of Betsy DeVos to be education secretary, the Education Department is likely not going anywhere, but it does have a good chance of refocusing on different priorities, including competition and choice in education.

Rick Hess, a researcher and author with experience working across the political spectrum to find solutions that often involve ideas from teachers who are actually good at what they do has come up with some thoughts for federal bureaucrats at the Education Department to repeat while they’re at work every day.

Here are a few of the highlights. Just say “Om.”

  • I’ll tell myself every day: “I’m no smarter than I used to be just because I’ve been hired as a federal bureaucrat.”
  • I’m in an office that I haven’t “earned” in any real sense and yet have a significant ability to influence the lives of millions of students, educators, and families. Thus, I’ll strive to remember that many of these people may disagree with me as to what’s “right” or in their best interest, and to accept their criticisms and disagreements in good faith.
  • I will remember that it’s Congress’ job to write the nation’s laws, and that the job of executive branch agencies (like the Department of Ed) is to execute those laws—not to rewrite them or impose their own.
  • I won’t allow all the people sucking up and asking for my time to give me an inflated sense of self. I’ll remember that their affection isn’t actually about me; it’s about access, influence, and money. When I fear I’m forgetting any of this, I’ll call an old friend or colleague who will call bulls$%t . . . and remind me what I used to say about self-impressed federal bureaucrats.

Read the entire mantra by Rick Hess at Education Next.

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The Gender Pay Gap Vs. College Degree Choices

October 21, 2016

Think there’s no gender pay gap? Hate to break it to you: there is. But how much of the gap is eliminated when an apples-to-apples comparison is made of all the variables that go into what men and women make? A lot!

A recent enlightening chart shows one of the variables that is often overlooked in reporting about where some of the gap begins.

The chart, constructed by economist Mark Perry, borrows from a Washington Post article about the 50 majors that offer the highest paying jobs out of college. The original article pulls from a report by job search engine Glassdoor.

Lo and behold, many of the highest-paying jobs are in fields where women are underrepresented in college graduation rates.

Shocker, right? Women are studying in majors whose fields offer lower-paying wages.

College degrees and gender wage gap

Perry’s comparison is rich in details. For instance, he notes that women earned 57 percent of the bachelor’s degrees in 2014 compared to 43 percent of men who graduated that year, yet men were “significantly over-represented for the highest-paying college majors,” specifically taking at least 80 percent of the degrees in eight of the top 10 highest-paying college majors. The one exception where women were overrepresented in a high-paying career — nursing.

He notes that for the top 20 college majors, men earn an average of nearly two-thirds of those degrees; and 60.5 percent of the degrees for the top 30 highest-paying fields.

Perry, a professor at University of Michigan-Flint, acknowledges that the comparison is complicated by the fact that the Department of Education, from where he pulled the gender data, does not separate out degree fields as carefully as Glassdoor, and doesn’t even list certain degrees that offer high-paying jobs.

For example, the Department of Education only reports the number of bachelor’s degrees by gender for the broad academic field of “engineering,” without any details on engineering degrees in the six sub-fields of engineering reported by Glassdoor (electrical, mechanical, chemical, etc.). Likewise, all of the business-related degrees in finance, accounting, marketing, human resources, advertising, etc. are only reported as bachelor’s degrees in “business” by the government. Economics degrees are included in the category Social Sciences, along with degrees in fields like sociology, anthropology, political science, etc. For some Glassdoor college majors like Fashion Design, Biotechnology, Graphic Design, Film Studies, Sports Management, it wasn’t clear what bachelor’s degrees reported by the Department of Education matched those majors, so I omitted 10 of the 50 college majors, leaving 40 majors in the table above.

The lack of detail by the Department of Education is interesting in itself, and certainly makes it more difficult for the federal government to claim to know the source of gender wage disparity, but Perry argues that the wage gap could be reduced if women chose career fields in the sciences and technical fields, as boring as they may seem to some.

Read more of Perry’s analysis.

Filed Under: Education, Front-Page Feature, Happiness Tagged With: , , , ,

Florida: Study Shows Impact of Marriage on Children’s Graduation Rates

September 23, 2016

Brad Wilcox at the Institute for Family Studies does some great research, and part of its greatness is that his results force policy makers to confront wisdom that is sometimes hard to hear, but ultimately super helpful in developing action plans.

The latest is a study he did on Florida schools, called Strong Families, Successful Schools, which builds on conclusions reached in a recent MIT study of 1 million Florida school children and found that poor boys are much more negatively impacted than poor girls, even within the same family, when families break up, and more so, that high-school graduation rates see a smaller gender gap when parents are married.

Wilcox and psychologist Nicholas Zill took the MIT study a step further and looked at the relationship between these variables on a macro-level — the county rates of high school graduation versus the number of married households with children in the county, across a five-year period.

Here’s what the researchers started out questioning:

We hypothesize that counties with more married families enjoy higher levels of parental engagement, better parental discipline, and more parental involvement in PTO groups, all factors that would likely redound to the social and educational benefit of children in these counties.”

This is what he found:

 

Specifically, Strong Families, Successful Schools finds that the share of married parent families in a county is one of the strongest predictors of high school graduation rates in the 67 counties across Florida, as well as recent growth in high school graduation rates in the Sunshine State.

The share of married families also is the strongest predictor of county school suspension rates in Florida in our models. Moreover, the share of families headed by married couples is a more powerful predictor of high school graduation and school suspension rates than are income, race, and ethnicity in Florida—factors that tend to get more attention in media and policy circles.

The report also finds that parental education is the best predictor of county high school graduation rates in Florida, according to our models (emphasis added). In sum, Florida counties that enjoy strong and stable families also tend to enjoy more successful and safer schools. Accordingly, policymakers, educators, and civic leaders should work to strengthen families—as well as schools—across the Sunshine State.

The study looks at several factors that play bear on high school graduation and suspension levels across the counties,  including marriage rates, adult education levels, income, race, and the size of the child population in the county.

The researchers acknowledge that the report does not look at the quality, character, and spending of county schools as they relate to graduation and suspension rates, and note that school quality obviously is a factor in performance. At the same time, however, the role of the family, specifically the relationship of parents, is a major variable in outcomes.

Click here to read the entire report.

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Cost of Higher Education to Spike From New Federal Loan Forgiveness Rules?

August 3, 2016

The advent of universal schooling was a noble, distinctly American endeavor that is responsible for massive strides in education among the American public. But the over-reliance on public education and a resistance to for-profit institutions has created its own beast, including a federal Department of Education that is overbearing in the areas of regulation and implicated in the rising cost of higher education.

No one wants to be cheated in their learning after paying the pricey cost of higher education, and while some predatory for-profit institutions need to be reined in to prevent substandard college-level teaching, the creation of a new trigger in the Department of Education to cover the tab for students who didn’t get what they expected could be the next step in the push for universal higher education.

That appears to be a potential outcome resulting from the latest set of guidelines proposed to penalize for-profit schools — and even public universities — when students don’t get the post-degree payoff they expected.

Under the new (Education Department) proposal, former students may apply for (loan) forgiveness if a college has made a ‘substantial misrepresentation’ to its students, defined as a statement or omission with a ‘likelihood or tendency to mislead under the circumstances.’ This clear-as-mud definition would give wide latitude for complaints. In a typical fraud cause, the burden is on the plaintiff to demonstrate an ‘intent to deceive.’ Here, the burden would be on the defendant to disprove a ‘tendency.’ The verdict will rest on the whim of a Department of Education hearing examiner; colleges will have no recourse to a court of law.

According to the Education Department, these regulations are aimed primarily at for-profit colleges. But, this standard would apply to all colleges, and all ought to be alarmed. For-profits aren’t the only institutions that could find themselves accused of fraud.

Take, for example, Arizona Law School, ranked 40 by U.S. News and World Report’s ‘Best Law Schools.’ Alumni could point to a flier boasting a 2.8 percent unemployment rate nine months after graduation. Bloggers at Above the Law accused the law school of deception, pointing out that Law School Transparency lists the number at 9.7 percent. Arizona Law School responded that 9.7 percent was the nonemployed number, which included those who are not seeking work, so they were well within their rights to advertise 2.8 percent. No court would call this fraud.

But an enterprising graduate could claim that it ‘had a tendency to mislead under the circumstances,’ and recruit all alumni who plausibly could have seen that flier for a joint-action complaint. The burden would be on the ‘schools to demonstrate that individuals in the identified group did not in fact rely on the misrepresentation at issue.’ That being plainly impossible, a hearing officer could grant loan forgiveness to all. These graduates wouldn’t just see their outstanding balance erased, they’d also recoup the last six years of payments.

How does this affect the taxpayer? Well, according to author Max Eden in U.S. News & World Report, quoted above, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both have proposals for dealing with loan forgiveness, and both appear to open the door for the public to ultimately cover the cost of repaying student loans. Clinton’s proposal is flat-out taxpayer spending while Trump’s idea would force universities into an asset insurance program that could clearly drive the schools into bankruptcy.

Eden doesn’t take the step of suggesting that the new regulations are an attempt to rig the system toward the ultimate ends of government-paid higher education, but if it becomes an exorbitantly prohibitive cost for colleges to protect themselves from spurious alumni demands for tuition repayment, that direction seems like an obvious heading.

Read more from Eden about how loan forgiveness rules could increase the cost of higher education paid by everyone.

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How Advanced Placement Classes Leave Kids Underprepared for College

July 25, 2016

A fascinating article that compares how well students perform in high school advanced placement classes and how they perform in college exposes the terrible disconnect created by high schools in teaching students how to think and hold critical discussion that occurs at the college level.

Many states have already reported that college students are not prepared, and places like California have seen remedial math and English classes exceed the 50-percent mark. The National Assessment of Educational Progress found in 2013 that only 39 percent of students scored at a math level and 38 percent scored at a reading level needed to be academically prepared for college.

Despite the highest rates ever recorded for high school graduations in the U.S., the dropout rates for college are also exceedingly high, wasting time and money while leaving students without the skills they need for employment.

Brookings Institute, a D.C.-based think tank, noted more than 20 small-scale studies by college professors since 1980 have been conducted using “their own students to investigate how much high school knowledge predicted performance in their college courses.”

Here’s what the studies, and then Brookings, found:

These published studies collectively show that the effect of high school course-taking on college grades ranges from -5.3 to +6.7 points on a 100-point scale. When comparing students of similar race, gender, standardized test scores, and socioeconomic background, most of the papers find that high school course-taking makes no more than a two percent difference in the final college grade, even when high school courses include Advanced Placement. …

Analyzing thousands of transcripts from the Department of Education’s National Educational Longitudinal Study, we found confirmatory evidence that advanced high school courses apparently do little to prepare students for success in college coursework.

Specifically, we showed that students with one more year of high school instruction in physics, psychology, economics, or sociology on average have grades in their first college course in the same subject just 0.003 to 0.2 points higher on a four-point scale. For example, for students of similar race, socioeconomic status, and high school standardized test scores, those who took a year of high school economics earn a final grade in their college economics class 0.03 points higher than students who have never encountered that subject before. What’s more, these trivially small differences hold even for students who took exactly the same college course.

The authors at Brookings noted that what doesn’t work is better known that what does, and point to a lack of argumentative and non-fiction writing as barriers to performance in college-level courses. The also suggest teaching with less traditional models like AP classes and start focusing more on “non-cognitive skill development and technical education.”

Read the Brookings Institute’s report on college preparedness.

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Is College Worth It? Colorado Website Measures ROIs

June 27, 2016

If you’re thinking of going to college, or sending someone to college, it’s typical to wonder, is college worth it?

Well, according to a new website, these hot jobs may be, or maybe not.

— Accountant/Auditor
— General and Operations Manager
— Market Research Analyst and Marketing Specialist
— Registered Nurse
— Software Developer, Applications
— Computer Systems Analyst
— Construction Manager
— Cost Estimator
— Management Analyst
— Software Developer, Systems Software

What does it mean to be “hot”? Launch My Career Colorado doesn’t answer that question directly, but it does offer an interactive tool to determine the “Return on Investment” (ROI) for a college degree. The ROI isn’t measured as a percent return on the cost of college per se, but the difference between what an individual would make in his or her chosen industry over 20 years if armed with various degrees and certificates rather than merely a high school diploma.

A traditional four-year college education isn’t for everyone, and the state of Colorado makes clear that it has its own interests at heart as well as students’, boasting that the site “helps you see just how much continuing your education after high school might pay off for you, your family, and Colorado!”

But the state website does offer some useful tools. It allows people to enter the major, job, industry, and school they are interested in, and fires back the best schools for the major, or conversely, the best majors for the school.

It also lists how much people make in hot jobs, and what are the top skills that employers in Colorado are seeking from employees.

Economist Mark Perry points out some other interesting findings, including that jobs like petroleum engineering have a large ROI while careers in women’s studies do not. He notes that some of the best ROIs aren’t earned in degrees received at four-year institutions.

Interestingly, Perry also notes that the average graduating student in the Class of 2016 walks away from college with a $37,172 debt. This is even more relevant considering that Cleveland Cavalier LeBron James last year pledged $41 million to send 1,100 kids to his alma mater, the University of Akron in Ohio. He’s giving each student nearly $9,500 per year. That’s $37,273 per student to finish a four-year education at Akron.

So clearly, Akron is par for the course. But as Perry points out, students at UC-Boulder, Colorado’s flagship public university, pay nearly $100,000 for tuition, fees, textbooks, and room and board over the four and a half to five years it takes them to earn their degrees.

That makes looking at the website all that more critical.

The site is only exclusive to Colorado schools right now, but being partly funded by the US Chamber of Commerce, it will be expanded to 12 other states. At the very least, the chamber recognizes that the value of an education lies not in whether a student attends a four-year school, but whether education gets students to where they need to be in their lives, whether via a four-year accounting degree or a two-year emergency medical technician training program, or something else that will pay off in the long-run.

Most importantly, the site points out that better education not only helps a person land more income, but “people who continue their education after high school report better health and more involvement in their community than those who don’t.”

And that’s probably the most valuable takeaway of continuing education.

Filed Under: Education, Front-Page Feature, Happiness

Lost Equality of Opportunity Is Biggest Threat to Education

June 25, 2016

Diamonds are forever. Desegregation orders will be, too, if our end goal for Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is merely to color-code American classrooms rather than to create equality of opportunity.

The latest case comes from the state of Mississippi. On May 13, to meet a desegregation order that began in the 1960s, a U.S. district judge ordered the state’s Cleveland School District to consolidate its two middle and high schoolsbeginning in the 2016-’17 school year. According to Judge Debra M. Brown, Cleveland’s failure to consolidate its largely racially separate schools in the past had “deprived generations of students of the constitutionally guaranteed right to an integrated education.” This is just one of hundreds of cases like it; the Justice Department currently has 177 open desegregation cases.

Enforcing desegregation orders is important because desegregation’s effects on American schooling have been positive. For example, a 2015 report found that black children born between 1945 and 1968 who attended a desegregated school were more likely to complete college, more likely to earn a higher salary, less likely to be incarcerated and had better health than their peers.

Read more about the lost equality of opportunity due to an overdependence on desegregation policy.

Filed Under: Education, Happiness, News

A New Social Science Scandal

June 24, 2016 by Arthur C. Brooks

Professors are mere human beings. Naturally, then, each has his or her guilty pleasure. In my case, it was candy corn and circus peanuts.

Other academics’ guilty pleasures seem to be less benign. For example, some scholars cannot resist the allure of research findings that can be weaponized into ad hominem political attacks — and then cash in on a little media buzz as a result. Every couple of months, it seems, we see headlines trumpeting the latest juicy, data-driven potshot aimed squarely at conservative Americans. “New study shows conservatives can’t count. And they hate puppies!”

This kind of motivated reasoning is hardly universal. I can report firsthand that most academics, whatever their personal predilections, are above this kind of bad behavior. But they still happen pretty regularly.

For a prime example, consider a 2013 study published in the American Journal of Political Science. It was entitled “Correlation Not Causation: The Relationship Between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies.” The paper’s main aim was to debunk the idea that a person’s personality type leads directly to their political ideology. But buried deep in the study’s empirical findings was a pretty provocative data point: Compared to liberals, the authors wrote, conservatives scored significantly higher on measures of psychoticism.social science scandal

Sounds pretty bad for conservative citizens, right? You don’t need a PhD to understand this is basically saying “conservatives are dangerous.” To add insult to injury, the study also seemed to lavish praise on the personalities of conservatives’ political opponents. Left-leaning individuals reportedly scored higher on scales of “social desirability,” meaning they possessed a greater predisposition to try to please others.

But this time, it was actually conservatives who got the last laugh. It turns out the scholars made a pretty big mistake. At some point, someone misread the way the political ideology data were coded in the research. They mistook the data on liberals for the data on conservatives, and vice versa. What does this mean? These controversial results were actually the exact opposite of what the authors reported.

Conservatives are justifiably enraged. But so are some liberals. I originally heard about this egregious case of academic maleficence in a tweet from an accomplished left-leaning economist.

Of course, this story raises pressing questions about the impact that ideological prejudice may be having within academia. As a former professor, this is a topic I care deeply about, and I’ve written about it at some length in the New York Times.

But this little episode has me thinking about another bigger-picture issue. The cognitive problem of confirmation bias — people letting their mental guard down when a claim gels with their preconceived notions — does not impact only social science research. It plays out in our everyday lives, shaping everything from our political debates to our professional lives to our interpersonal relationships.

So I’m mulling a longer piece that would look at the broad impact of confirmation bias across American life. Keep your eyes out for my take as I dig into this more in upcoming weeks. In the meantime, feel free to drop this fun story at your next cocktail party. If you’re a conservative, maybe it will reassure your family and friends that you are not, in fact, crazy.

Filed Under: Education, Front-Page Feature, Happiness, Insight

The Other Campus Free-Speech Problem No One’s Talking About

June 21, 2016

During the past few years, responding to ever-more draconian codes on secular campuses aimed at constraining free speech, dissenting voices have been raised here and there across the political spectrum, defending free expression and free association for all. This addition of conscientious objection outside conservative and religious ranks is a welcome development. It also brings us to one other large threat to free speech in education these days—one that’s still in the closet.

Secularist progressivism claims to champion diversity, but its activists today do not tolerate genuine diversity, including and es­pecially in the realm of ideas, as revealed by today’s legal and other attacks on Christian colleges, Christian associations and clubs, Christian schools, Christian students, and Christian homeschooling. …

H. L. Mencken memorably defined puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” By similar logic, neo-puritanism appears to be the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be a Christian exercising the right to free associa­tion with other Christians. To survey today’s attacks on religious education is to understand that traditionalists have reason to believe they are being singled out for ideological marksmanship as others are not.

Read the rest of the article by Mary Eberstadt on campus free speech at The Federalist.

 

Filed Under: Education, Life

School Choice Laws and the Parents They Ignore

June 6, 2016

At least 45 states and the District of Columbia have enacted 102 school choice laws, but those laws barely regard the role of parental rights and responsibilities, according to a new study of education statutes.

In all, the states and nation’s capital have 43 charter school laws, 25 voucher laws, 20 tax-credit laws, 9 tax-deduction laws, and 5 Education Savings Account (ESA) laws on the books, and many of these laws have been beneficial in helping students get out from under the yoke of ineffective education systems.

Nonetheless, says Gerard Robinson, a former commissioner of education for Florida and secretary of education for Virginia, the school choice laws really only pay lip service when it comes to the parents’ rights and responsibilities in their children’s education.

After analyzing results from 20 choice laws in particular, and reviewing 82 other choice laws in general, my research found that regrettably, existing choice laws demonstrate that parental rights and responsibilities in education statutes are little more than a dull roar. More often than not, when ‘parent’ is mentioned in a school choice law, it is about the legal structure of the program or is a brief hat tip toward parents — rather than language that empowers them when it comes to the education of their child.

The reason to involve parents in a child’s education is not just theoretical. Existing research has shown that parent involvement can boost the academic outcomes of students.”

This is not to say that parents are ignored in the laws. Robinson notes that parents are mentioned quite a bit, but mainly in the context of the authority to opt their children in or out of traditional schooling as well as in the funding of Education Savings Accounts.

Those mentions don’t really address the rights and responsibilities of parents in their children’s education, and to hear it told by mass media, students are better off if their parents don’t get involved. Googling “parental expectations” brings up an array of stories about the damage parental expectations can wreak on children’s performance and grades.

But really, that is a lot of hype.

Several studies show that not only do children assimilate better when they have behavioral norms placed on them by parents — punishment for bad behavior and reward for good — but involved parenting actually raises students’ performance in school by as much as four-tenths of a grade point across student age groups.

Several studies have shown how technology can play a role in enabling parents to participate in their children’s education, with a positive outcome. Programs already in existence in some areas include daily text updates to parents or portals for parents to review their kids’ assignments and their progress on curricula.

But the rights and responsibilities question goes beyond merely helping one’s child do his or her homework or keeping an eye on them while they’re out of sight. If parents are to be involved in raising their own children, why would they leave it to the state to determine what level of involvement they should have?

By insisting on greater rights and responsibilities in the educational system, Robinson contends and the evidence supports, schools are better equipped to teach, and parents are one step closer to improving their children’s outcomes.

Read Gerard Robinson’s survey on school choice laws and the acknowledgement of parents’ rights and responsibilities.

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