By E.W. Jackson
All across the country, improving the quality of education in our public school system sparks a lot of controversy and heated exchanges on both sides. One thing we should be able to agree on is that children should come first. But the continued opposition to parental choice in education is the Achilles heel of many Democratic politicians.
Perhaps you saw the front page article on the Richmond Times-Dispatch just a few weeks ago. Schools in urban areas across the Commonwealth are failing to meet minimum education standards and leaving our children and their families with fewer opportunities to have a better future. Everywhere I go I meet families who want to do better for their children but are unable to afford to free themselves from a system that is failing them. That is why I have continually focused on championing parental choice in education as the key to improving failing schools.
The evidence to support this solution is overwhelming: everywhere it has been tried, it has worked. Ask former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels. When he implemented parental choice among public schools there, it was so popular that they included private schools in the mix.
Did the public schools suffer? No, they got better. When we make the education of children the primary mission over protecting union bureaucrats, schools improve.
In Richmond City, only 13 out of 44 schools – less than 1/3 – are fully accredited. The same is true in urban areas all over the Commonwealth. All told six schools – six – are slated to be taken over by the state because their administrators have failed their students so badly.
Think for a moment of the cost of this failure. The cost in taxpayer money. The cost of time. The cost to the futures of our children in urban areas. Poor children have been locked into failing and poorly performing public schools for decades while educational and political elites have actively prevented these students from getting the better educational opportunities they are due.
Competition is not a bad thing when it comes to education. When employees, including teachers, are incentivized for superior work with bonuses and promotions, they work even harder and achieve greater results. When employees know it is nearly impossible to fire them, that they will get the same salary for less work, some will tend to “coast.”
There are notable exceptions, but, by and large, the system is built to protect the teacher and the administration at the cost of a quality education for the children.
For so many across the Commonwealth, the system just isn’t working. Students of Peterburg’s A.P. Hill Elementary have suffered in a school that has failed to meet minimum state standards for EIGHT YEARS. Lafayette-Winona Middle School in Norfolk has failed to meet standards for FOUR YEARS. Yet officials ask for more money and more time. For the sake of these students, we must say that time is up.
Virginia’s educational budget has ballooned from $9.5 billion in 2003 to $15 billion in 2013. Yet the system continues to beg for more. And the education unions continue to dump thousands of dollars into the campaign coffers for those who will further their agendas instead of putting the children first.
The next great civil rights battle is in educational opportunity. Our failure to provide a quality education to all, no matter what their economic background, is consigning many to a lifetime of low skilled jobs or unemployment. They are denied opportunity and dignity afforded by a good skill and job. They are denied the promise of a better future.
It has been demonstrated repeatedly in Virginia and the nation that pouring vast sums of new money into a non-competitive, anti-choice, mediocre public school system has not worked. We do need choice. We do need competition. It is the ONLY way we can get excellent results in our schools.
This is why parental choice in education needs to happen – and as Lieutenant Governor I will work relentlessly to make it happen.
E.W. Jackson is the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor
