CHICAGO – School choice will put the focus on students and their needs.

Via ChicagoNow.com:

The fact is the public schooling system today only serves students secondarily. As Chicagoans witnessed last fall, the system is rigged in such a way that a private organization called the Chicago Teachers Union must be appeased first before public schools will even begin to offer instruction to students. Merits of the CTU’s demands aside, it was able to close nearly every school in Chicago singlehandedly.

Far from being a broken institution, public schools across the country are working exactly as they have been designed: to meet the needs of the adults they employ.

This is a difficult notion for many to accept. After all, the public schools claim to be a great leveler, aggregating students from various backgrounds into communities of learners led by adults who have dedicated their lives to nurturing young minds in difficult environments.

Indeed, owning to the nature of representative government, public institutions often must accept many missions simultaneously, causing them to do none very well.

Those agitating for education policy reform come from two broad camps. The first are those who seek to further centralize schooling by diverting more resources to public schools so they may spend more on educational missions at which they have already failed. And the second camp are those who seek to decentralize schooling by fostering the formation of independent schools that can more easily adapt to serve the needs of students.

Were the forces of the schooling bureaucracy not so well organized and supported by taxpayer money intended to support education, it may have been easy for those seeking school choice to accomplish their aims. Unfortunately, many earnest parents and community leaders have bought into the frightening ideological narrative that teachers must be part of a permanent bureaucracy that aids in controversial political aims such as forcing income equality.

It should be painfully obvious by now that turning teachers into bureaucrats makes schooling–that process of providing young minds with information and experience to prepare them for adulthood–outdated, slow, and inflexible. Turning teachers into bureaucrats makes them functionaries for policymakers whose priorities before educating children on the south side of Chicago are many.