Unless you happen to be on certain email lists,  you probably didn’t know that Governor Lee has recently announced a review of the state’s Basic Education Program funding formula.  It’s the sort of boring stuff that governors do when they are focused on running their state and planning for its future, rather than running for Senator or President.  And here are the criteria that the governor has put forward:

• Prioritizes students over systems
• Empowers parents to engage in their child’s education
• Incentivizes student outcomes
• Ensures all students, regardless of location or learning needs, are served at a high-level
• Reflects Tennesseans’ values
• Creates flexible funding that prepare students for postsecondary success

The devil’s in the details, of course, so we’ll see how it works out.  But I like the sound of it.  While this could be nothing but wishful thinking on my part, it sounds like the governor is setting out on a sweeping effort to modernize not just education funding, but the way education is done in Tennessee.

For many years I’ve been puzzled by the fact that education is a de facto monopoly, with government as the monopolist.  The state government pays for it (mostly), sets overall policy and curriculum, and provides oversight.  Local governments own and oversee the schools, employ the bureaucrats who run them, and (almost as an afterthought, it sometimes seems) hire the teachers who do the important part.  If you don’t like the results – if your kid’s school isn’t doing the job – your options in Tennessee are pretty limited.  If you’re rich enough, you can send your kid to a private school.  If you’re determined enough, you can home-school.  Or, if you happen to live in Nashville and a few other places, you might be lucky enough to get your kid in a charter school.  In any case, you continue to pay taxes for schools that you literally won’t send your kid to.  Which raises the question: If they aren’t good enough for your kids, for whose kids are they good enough?

The argument for government funding of primary and secondary education is unassailable.  The public benefit of a well-educated population is so obvious that it needs no defense.  But does the same apply to government running the schools?  That’s not nearly so obvious, or, given the track record of the last 60 years, defensible.  Since the 1960s, in spite of all the national attention, high-flown rhetoric, emphasis on teacher education and gobs and gobs and gobs of money, educational outcomes as measured by test scores have been essentially stagnant.  Nothing we’ve tried since the 1950s has given us 18-year-olds better prepared to go out and make a place for themselves in the world.

In other words, the real-world evidence is that government operation of the schools has not been particularly successful, and in many ways must be considered a failure.

If that sounds like I’m hedging, well, I am.  A thundering “PUBLIC EDUCATION IS A DISASTER AND THE REPUBLIC IS IN MORTAL DANGER” would be a lot more emotionally satisfying and attention-grabbing, but it’s not the case.  Most public schools, especially in the suburbs and small cities and towns, do a pretty decent job.  And who would disagree that the people who go into education don’t do it for their health or to get wealthy?  But what that means is that we’re doing no better than muddling through.  Continuing to do the same old thing the same old way means we’ll keep muddling through – and that simply isn’t good enough.  We know from results elsewhere in the world that children can be much better educated at reasonable cost than is now the case in the U.S.  We can, we should, and we must do better.

OK, you say, Mr. Smart Guy, just how are we going to do so much better?  The short and completely truthful answer to that question is that I’m not that smart, and I don’t know.  However, I am smart enough to think that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to education that is the optimal method for all children, and that the people who have the best handle on what’s best for a particular child is that child’s parents.

Which is where I suspect, and hope, that the governor is heading.  For those of us who’ve kept abreast of this issue for years and decades, it sounds like what he intends to propose is a universal voucher system.  Rather than the state’s money being given to the school in which a child is enrolled, it’s given to the parents to use as they think best for the child’s education.  That could be at the local government-run school, or another government-run school that the parents think is better. (This is something we already see in Carter County, which loses more and more students to Elizabethton every year.  Under current state law, schools which have the room can offer places to out-of-system students who pay nominal tuition.  No offense to the Carter County schools, but it’s no secret that Elizabethton’s schools are better.)  Or the voucher could be used at a charter school or private school.  Or the parent could keep the money and use it to subsidize the cost of homeschooling.  With proper safeguards in place (and it’s crucial that the safeguards be there and be aggressively enforced) this empowers the parents to direct their children’s education as they see fit – just the way it should be.

Now, I’m not naïve enough to think that we’ll see dramatic improvements in the overall outcome; as a matter of fact, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if there are initial setbacks as we get used to the new system.  But gradually, with time, improvements there would be.  The drivers would be parental involvement, since they are being handed the responsibility and the wherewithal for their children’s education; and competition, since schools that don’t perform would soon find themselves out of business (and homeschooling parents who don’t perform would find themselves facing criminal penalties for ill-using voucher money).

But perhaps the most important result is that kids would no longer be forced into a one-size-fits-all situation; instead, the parents could see to it that the education was tailored to fit the child, within reasonable limits.  So, for example, the car-loving kid, having finished his core curriculum (in the original sense intended by E.D. Hirsch, not the monstrosity the term eventually came to denote), could devote his time to preparing for life as a mechanic, engineer, designer, or other car-centric career, rather than wasting time on subjects in which he has utterly no interest.  A few brilliant kids would finally be free to learn at their own greatly-accelerated pace, rather than being bored to death in classrooms full of average kids learning at average speed.  The slow kids would see their learning proceed at the slower pace they need, and at which they, too, can thrive.  If this sounds far-fetched, it’s not.  It’s exactly what we already have in our post-secondary universities, colleges, community colleges, and technical schools, which tailor their offerings to the students they serve.  The kid who will do well at Harvard University is not the same kid who will do well at Northeast State – and vice versa.  This is just an extension to primary and secondary education of the model that makes American post-secondary education the world’s standard.  And there is every reason to think it would work just as well.

Radical reform of education is one of those third-rail issues, like Social Security. Everyone knows it’s desperately needed, but no one can figure out how to do it without getting (politically) killed.  So here’s wishing and hoping for the best, tempered by realism.  For our descendants’ sake, and for the sake of Tennessee, let’s hope Governor Lee can pull it off.

• Kenneth D. Gough © 2021