America's education system faces a stark dilemma: it needs governmental
oversight, rules and regulations, but it also needs to be adaptable
enough to address student needs and the many different problems that can
arise at any given school--something that large educational
bureaucracies are notoriously bad at. Paul Hill and Ashley Jochim offer
here a solution that is brilliant for its simplicity and distinctly
American sensibility: our public education system needs a constitution.
Adapting the tried-and-true framework of our forefathers to the specific
governance of education, they show that the answer has been part of our
political DNA all along.
Most reformers focus on who should control education, but Hill and
Jochim show that who governs is less important than determining what
powers they have. They propose a Civic Education Council--a democratic
body subject to checks and balances that would define the boundaries of
its purview as well as each school's particular freedoms. They show how
such a system would prevent regulations meant to satisfy special
interests and shift the focus to the real task at hand: improving school
performance. Laying out the implications of such a system for parents,
students, teachers, unions, state and federal governments, and courts,
they offer a vision of educational governance that stays true to--and
draws on the strengths of--one of the greatest democratic tools we have
ever created.
