Instead of making kids go to school, why not make the schools worth going to?
"While grownups work overtime to fix the schools, the students are taking matters into their own hands," says Professor Bruce Cooper of the Graduate School of Education at Fordham University. "They are skipping school and cutting classes in record numbers." Writing in the premier issue of American Outlook, a quarterly publication of the Hudson Institute, Cooper notes that the kid who played hooky used to be "a misguided youth who had fallen in with the 'wrong crowd,' or a troubled pupil taking out his maladjustment on the school, or a child from a 'bad home,' one that was loveless, drug-ridden, abusive, or otherwise lacking the 'right values.'"
That profile has changed. It's no longer the truants who are maladjusted; now it's the schools. "In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, mandatory attendance prevented poor families from sending their sons and daughters to work rather than school, thus enabling children to better their lot in life," Cooper recalls. "Today, by contrast, many families depend on schools to look after their young so that a single parent or both parents can work. Along with the prison system, public education is one of the few remaining compulsory services in the U.S."
Unlike incarcerated criminals, however, public school inmates are escaping in record numbers. "Some chronic cutters are undoubtedly troubled youth," Cooper concedes, "but truancy is now so endemic that we must stop blaming the victim and instead reassess the nature of our monopolistic, compulsory, government-owned, government-run education system. This system . . . sends the wrong message about who is responsible for the education of our children," he contends. "The truancy epidemic clearly indicates that compulsion is a poor foundation for a quality education."
Cooper concludes that "we should eliminate the very concept of truancy and the policies that enforce it. Schools would then be forced to earn their students' (and parents') confidence and loyalty outright, through an education that is interesting and of high quality. Defining truancy as a legal transgression gets the school off the hook," he argues. "Ending compulsory education in the U.S. neatly defines away truancy," quips Cooper, who emphasizes that voluntary attendance "challenges public and private schools to serve their customers, and returns authority and responsibility to parents."
Of course, parents of private school students already have a strong financial incentive for asserting their authority and responsibility. And parents of public school students can reclaim theirs any time they want to. Nobody's forcing them to send their offspring to public schools. The vast majority could well afford to finance a private-school education. The ugly truth is, they don't care enough to do so. They like their little discount, the subsidy provided to them by taxpaying neighbors. Maybe the first step in reforming the public school system is to establish means testing, and make parents (who can) pay the full cost of their child's education. The extra charge might help them rediscover their authority.
