Mute Buttons: Two Ways the School Complex Muzzles Parents and Students

by
Karl Streitel
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I was asked the other day why parents and students do not have more say in their education in the government system, and my reply was simply “because that is the goal.” Specifically, the system exists to perpetuate itself and to propagandize large numbers of children each year so that they believe and pass on to their children the myths that permit government predation. In order to do so, the system and those in it must quash individuality of any significant form and foster a process that is labyrinthine, at best, and impossible, at worst, for making even picayune changes therein.

Over time, this system has expanded to include more than 80% of all children in the United States, 3.2 million teachers, 97,568 schools, an average of over 500 students per school, and nearly $1 trillion in tax funds each year. Consequently, a behemoth such as the one that has metastasized in this country has innumerable ways to muzzle both parents and students, but two primary methods ensure compliance and uniformity in the system and its graduates—compulsion and bureaucracy.

Compulsion: Papers (and Dollars), Please

Compulsion in government schools takes two interdependent and equally sinister forms—compulsory attendance laws and compulsory funding.

By 1917, every state had enacted compulsory school attendance for children through the age of 16 or 18, depending on the state. Such compulsory school laws mean, in practice, children are forced into their local government schools by default unless their parents or guardians opt out by completing the steps required by the state. Thus, parents and students are at the mercy of the state from the outset.

Such a system intrinsically inhibits parents’ rights and voices by obliging them to interact with the state to meet requirements and/or prove the validity of curricula. Although such permission takes different forms across the country, many states require some type of notification to the local school authorities, some form of education until a state-specified age, teaching of state-mandated subjects, administration of state testing, and even certain immunizations. Furthermore, such requirements can change at a politician’s whim, so the very existence of such laws is a lingering threat to parental and student choice and autonomy.

Correspondingly, hazardous to students’ and parents’ voices, is the second form of compulsion, namely, compulsory funding. Across the country, every property owner pays the majority of his or her property taxes towards the local school system, which is also buttressed by state and federal funds to greater or lesser degrees depending on the district. Regardless of one’s support or opposition to that district and regardless of one’s status as a parent or a childless individual, each person is required by force to support the local school system. This mandatory support now totals $18,614 per student, on average, as of 2021.

Perhaps more important than the actual amount of funding (which is certainly staggering), though, is that the compulsory aspect of that funding means that school boards and others in the system have little to no incentives to meet parents’ requests and students’ needs. As economics teaches us, monopolies inexorably lead to higher prices and lower quality because consumers have no other choices. When schools are compulsorily funded, they effectively become local monopolies because, even though there may be alternative options available to parents and students, the government schools still receive funding from everyone who lives in that area.

If I opt to enroll my child in a local microschool or perhaps to homeschool him or her, I am now responsible for paying for that education in addition to the property taxes that support the local school my child does not use. And lest people believe that vouchers and education savings accounts (ESAs) are the solution, recognize that such options still utilize tax dollars extracted from others and have led to no tangible decreases in government-school funding. For example, Arizona has a universal ESA program that grants approximately $7,000 per student (or even $30,000+ for students diagnosed with autism), but, per the Goldwater Institute that worked to implement the ESA program in Arizona, “state and local funding for public schools has increased substantially during the years in which the ESA program has operated, rising over $2,000 per student (20 percent) in inflation-adjusted terms since the program began.”

Thus, even when parents opt out of the government system and take their (and others’) money elsewhere, funding and the taxes that support it still increase, ensuring that those in charge of the government system have little need to address any real parent and student concerns since their gravy train will continue relentlessly.

Bureaucracy: Mo’ People, Mo’ Problems

Parents and students are effectively silenced and shunted aside by the ever-growing bureaucracy that thrives parasitically on the aforementioned compulsory elements of the system. As both the public and private spheres prove, larger entities tend to be more ossified and inflexible than do smaller organizations. Thus, in responding to market demands, smaller enterprises have the benefits of being able to respond more quickly and individualistically, on average, than larger entities can.

Such is the truth observed each day in the government school system, in which layer upon layer of bureaucracy ensures that few substantive changes actually occur, and that parental and student needs are rarely, if ever, addressed. For example, in the district in which I worked, we had the following levels of bureaucracy and decision-making—teachers, assistant department chairs, department chairs, curriculum/subject coordinators, assistant principals, principals, central office coordinators (HR, business department, etc.), assistant superintendents, superintendent, school board members.

Something as simple as swapping out a book in an English class might require approval of three or more of those levels and months or perhaps years of committee meetings, proposals, and revisions. (For those whose immediate reaction is positive to such a process because it may prevent material they do not like from entering the classroom, recognize that would not be a problem if it were simple and affordable to remove your children from a class or school in which such objectionable material was being used).

Moreover, curricula are designed and chosen by teachers, administrators, and state bureaucrats, so parents have little to no input. This bureaucratic process also ostracizes parents and students in that each decision will apply to hundreds or thousands of students, so no real opportunities exist for individualization—if a student wants to skip part of a curriculum, for instance, there is no mechanism to do so because everyone must learn the same material to get the same diploma.

As a personal example, in one instance, I learned of a computer-based vocabulary program that personalized instruction for each student from a shared list of several thousand words. I suggested piloting this program in lieu of the Sadlier-Oxford textbooks we then used for vocabulary instruction (consisting of 20 units of 20 words each), but I was not permitted to do so because not every teacher in my subject area and level across the two high schools would be using that program, so my students would have received a different “learning experience” than would their peers. This pilot program may have served students better or worse than the current program did, but students and parents never had the opportunity to make that choice for themselves. Ultimately, the bureaucracy intervened to ensure uniformity was maintained and customer (student and parent) feedback was avoided.

Conclusion

Contrast such a system described above with a private microschool with two adult guides and six to ten students, as is common to models such as Prenda. In this type of system, each student can work at his or her own pace using different curricula at different times and swapping them in and out as needed and as preferred. The adults and students can make changes to the daily schedule, rules, organization of the classroom, and myriad other aspects of the school and day immediately based on demonstrated student needs and parental feedback. Parents pay monthly tuition for such an educational environment they and their students willingly choose and value, and they stop paying and remove their children if that value vanishes.

This type of system and others like it in the burgeoning alternative-school movement (and especially in homeschooling environments) treat parent and student voices and needs as keystones, not afterthoughts or offal, because compulsion and bureaucracy are as foreign herein as are healthy lunches in government schools.

Thus, changes to government schooling cannot occur via school board candidates promising to end the “woke agenda” or teachers who offer students a choice of projects at the end of the required reading. Real change can only occur when compulsion and bureaucracy are extirpated from the system—something that is only possible by continuing to build and support better alternatives and by finding ways, via referenda and the like, to finally starve the present system of the coercive funding it needs to sustain itself.