The Illusion of Local Control

Local control is an exalted value of K-12 education in the United States. But it is an illusion.

Control of K-12 education in the United States is in fact exerted by departments, schools, and colleges of education across the nation. These entities are formally distinct but they have highly similar approaches to the training of teachers. Those who teach the courses through which teachers gain certification are guided by very similar principles. Virtually all education professors believe the following:

Teachers are classroom facilitators whose function is to guide students in accessing information. The information to be accessed is that which either follows student interest or follows the teacher’s own identification of a topic to be investigated. There is an emphasis on exploring topics of interest to student and teacher, rather than the systematic accumulation of factual knowledge in areas such natural science, history, government, economics, psychology, English composition, English literature, the fine arts, and even mathematics. Professors of education maintain that in the ever-changing information age, a set body of systematically accumulated knowledge is unnecessary. A student or teacher who desires to know something can always look up whatever she or he needs to know. Memorization of factual information in such a context is a boring and wasteful exercise. Critical thinking is far more important than memorization.

Administrators, school counselors, curriculum development specialists, and any others training for positions pertinent to staffing any K-12 school in the United States imbibe a similar approach to education. Heads of teachers’ unions seek to advance the interests of teachers who hold such views, and they act in the financial interests of teachers whose advancement is determined by the “step and ladder” system, whereby a teachers’ pay advances in the same way as any other teacher who has taught for a like number of years and attained a certain academic degree. Elementary teachers generally get their degrees directly from education departments. Secondary teachers often have bachelor’s degrees in disciplines such as history, biology, or math, but virtually no teachers today have master’s degrees granted from such academic departments; rather, they are master’s degrees in teaching some subject, granted from departments, schools, or colleges of education.

There would be a much better approach to education than the one detailed and implied above. Such an approach would fill our classrooms with experts in natural science, history, government, economics, English composition, English literature, music, visual art, and mathematics. They would have master’s degrees in those disciplines. Teachers would certainly encourage student research and critical thinking, but only upon the foundation of a solid knowledge base, utilizing memorization as one important learning tool. Teachers in this professionalized sense would be paid for their knowledge and ability to advance student achievement, and their remuneration would be greater than anyone on a radically reduced central school district office staff.

But no one acting at the local level is likely to confront the various members of the education establishment with a program for the needed overhaul in K-12 education. Doing this takes more courage than is possessed by most people, who would have to confront those in the education establishment who are often fellow community members with whom one interacts in other realms of life.

And so we hold to our illusion of local control, stuck with a K-12 system of education that in fact is subtly nationalized via institutions of educator training and lamentably uniform in its inability to properly educate our young people for their individual futures as citizens who will also determine the fate of the United States.