Photo by Gage Skidmore

Photograph by Gage Skidmore

The first major discussion of didactics in the 2022 presidential campaign has centered not on reforms like teacher tenure or what should replace the No Child Left Behind law just on the merits of public education itself.

Current GOP frontrunner Rick Santorum, a major proponent of homeschooling, wants to diminish the part of states and the federal government in public education, and put more power and control into the easily of parents.

"The thought that the federal authorities should be running schools, bluntly much less that the land government should be running schools, is anachronistic," he said in comments concluding week in Columbus, Ohio. "It goes back to the time of industrialization of America when people came off the farms where they did home-school or have the petty neighborhood school, and into these big factories, so we built equal factories chosen public schools."

The contempt to the public school system Santorum expressed over the past week echoed like statements he has been making for years, and on the campaign trail.

"Public schools?," he declared disparagingly in New Hampshire a yr ago."That'southward a overnice way of putting it. These are authorities-run schools."

Since 1879 the California Constitution has mandated that a "arrangement of common schools … be kept up and supported" in the state. If he had the opportunity, Santorum might well label that clause as an anachronism standing in the mode of parental rights.

Merely as in other states, no California schools are run by the state or federal government, except for those in juvenile detention facilities and the handful of financially troubled districts taken over by a state administrator in return for getting country bond-out loans.

The federal authorities "can help," Santorum said last week. That is what it does now, providing nigh eleven percent of school funding.  The rest comes from state and local sources.

Schools are nonetheless run by local boards. Those boards are one of the primary features setting the The states autonomously from many countries where schools are governed by a combination of national curricula, exams and tests.

"I think the parent should be in charge," Santorum explained, "working with the local school commune to effort to design an educational environment for each child that optimizes their potential."

But in California parents and children arguably accept more educational choices than they e'er had:

  • California'southward public education system serving half-dozen.2 million children consists of nearly ten,000 schools, varying in size and emphasis.
  • In many public school districts, parents tin choose between options such every bit magnet schools, schools within schools, and career academies.
  • Nearly 1,000 lease schools, with an enrollment of 412,000 children, offer a vast assortment of approaches.
  • California's "parent trigger" law gives a majority of parents in at to the lowest degree some schools the ability to radically transform information technology, including turning into a charter school.
  • California has a vibrant private school sector, attended by 515,000 students.
  • Homeschools are an "increasingly popular culling" according to the HomeSchool Association of California, which estimates they serve "anywhere between threescore,000 to 200,000 children" in the country.

In his writings and on the campaign trail, Santorum suggests that homeschooling is the preferred form of educating children. It'due south how he and his wife Karen taught his children (with the help of several years in an online public lease school).

in his volume, It Takes A Family, Santorum contrasts "mass education" as an "abnormality" at least compared to the option of homeschooling:

It's amazing that so many kids turn out to be fairly normal, considering the weird socialization they get in public schools.

In a home school, by dissimilarity, children collaborate in a rich and circuitous way with adults and children of other ages all the time. In general, they are meliorate-adjusted, more at ease with adults, more capable of conversation, more able to notice when a younger child needs help or condolement, and in general a lot better socialized than their mass-schooled peers.

At root, Santorum seems to favor a more individualized education system that runs confronting the grain of  the bipartisan thrust of education reform over the by decade, which has been to emphasize a more centralized, elevation-down approach to education reform, kickoff with the No Child Left Behind law a decade ago, and now embodied in the "Common Cadre State Standards" adopted by almost all states, including California.

The sweeping No Child Left Behind law represents one of the most vigorous federal government intrusions into local schools in the nation's history. It was the abstraction of a Republican president, then-President George Due west. Bush. Santorum was ane of a majority of Republicans who voted for the police in 2001. He now says his vote was a mistake.

Santorum would prefer to decentralize it even further, apparently wanting to push button more power from the local schoolhouse board down to the parent level. On his "Restoring America's Greatness" website, his teaching platform reads:

Rick Santorum believes that pedagogy is the responsibility of the consumer, the parent. Putting "parents first" is how best we put "students showtime."  Parents accept the primal right to direct the upbringing and education of their children with local schoolhouse systems supporting, as desired.

Just he has yet to spell out a plan for how this "parents showtime" approach would piece of work in practise, or how working parents wishing to homeschool would manage to fix classrooms in their living rooms—and and so transform themselves into teachers, imparting knowledge from third grade science to high school calculus.

Perhaps what Santorum is actually objecting to is not and then much federal or land-run schools, of which there are few, merely how much control or influence the federal or state government should exert over locally run schools. That is a more than mainstream fence beingness vigorously fought in California—and remains unresolved.

Information technology would be hard to find an educator in California that did not regard the swollen educational activity code, running into thousands of pages, equally urgently in need of slimming downwardly. A major thrust of Gov. Jerry Brownish'due south approach to education has been to eschew piling on more country mandates and to give more control to local schools and districts.

But Brown, who helped institute ii charter schools in Oakland, has non questioned the basic functioning of public education, or its central place in American lodge, and history.

Every bit for a argue on national policy problems such as what should supplant the No Child Left Behind law, the impact of President Obama's Race to the Top competition that pitted state against state, and the merits of linking instructor evaluations to student examination scores — with whatsoever luck that will happen in the fall.

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