By Steve Baldwin
As a member of the California State Assembly (1994-2000), and chair of the Education Committee, I witnessed firsthand how our public schools have been transformed. In the 1990s, I thought I could improve our education system by helping to organize a slate of over 50 school-board candidates in my county who shared values that promoted Godly values, parental rights, and academics. This slate resulted in over 25 wins.
Today, 30 years later, I cannot say this made any difference at all. These school-board members encountered state and federal mandates everywhere they turned. Not only that, many of them spent most of their time fighting recall efforts and lawsuits launched by the teacher unions. They have the funds to harass school board members full time whose politics and policies countered union efforts to be in full control of classroom and curriculum decisions. Not to mention there were almost daily attacks by the media.
Indeed, all the newly-elected members spent most of their time on the school boards defending themselves, and nearly all of them retired within a few years or were removed by a teacher-union puppet in subsequent elections. As far as I know, it had been the largest sweep of those holding conservative values to school boards perhaps in the last 60 years, but you would never know that by observing these same school districts today. Like most school districts in America, they continue to follow the government and union agenda without fail.
A classic example was the Vista School District in northern San Diego County. Candidates on the side of conservative values won 3 of its 5 seats, and one of the policies they championed was to allow teachers to introduce evidence critical of evolution. At no point did they try to ban the teaching of evolution. All they supported was freedom of inquiry on this issue. The opposition and its media allies went ballistic and for the next two years, that’s all they would talk about. Board members were recalled, lawsuits filed, and in the end, little change was accomplished. Within a few years, Vista was back to it union-approved, anti-parent policies. Today, they’re no different than any other school district dedicated to indoctrinating the children with societal, social and emotional teachings antithetical to those taught at home.
The Myth of Locally-Controlled Schools
First off, we all need to understand that our public schools have not been “locally controlled” for decades. It does not do us any good if a parent spends time, money and energy on winning a school-board seat, but then finds they will not have any major lasting impact.
Many well-intentioned leaders do not seem to understand this, but school districts must follow thousands of state and federal mandates. Almost all policies regarding teacher credentialling, testing, textbook selection, academic standards, bilingual education, special education, and even the construction of school facilities were centralized over the last 30 years to state and federal education departments. Basically, unelected state and federal bureaucrats are the ones who decide education policy in America today, not school boards, and certainly not parents.
The decisions school-board members make today are largely inconsequential, and are generally choices among options created by state or federal laws. As parents and churches slept over the last three decades, we lost control of our local schools to state and federal school bureaucrats who do not share the values of parents and their families. And it wasn’t just one group responsible for this. It involved a coalition of many organizations including teacher unions, politicians from all major parties, school-board associations, and the business establishment.
Today, America’s students are now out-performed even by students in Third World countries. We have a failing education system. American students can’t read or write at a world-class level anymore, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you.
The entire education bureaucracy, from the teacher’s union to the administrators, are committed to excluding parents from decision making, thinking they know what is best for “the children” and they do not care what parents think. Winning a few school-board seats will not change that one iota. I have been down this road, and I know how it ends.
The Myth of Public Schools being an American Institution
We call them public schools, but we really should call them what they are—government schools. Government schools were not part of America’s founding nor were they ever mentioned by our founder fathers. In fact, public school systems were not widespread until the late 1800s. Before then, all schools were privately operated and most of them were connected to a church. As education researcher Sam Blumenthal has written, this patchwork system of education produced a higher literacy rate than we have today!
And, of course, there are strong moral arguments against public schools as well. The Bible instructs parents to be responsible for raising their children and instilling in them virtuous values. See Proverbs 23:13-14; Luke 2: 48-52; Galatians 4:3-3; Ephesians 6:1-4; and Colossians 3:20-24. The public schools claim to not teach religious values, but they do; they teach he values of humanism and atheism, both religious doctrines. By turning our children over to the public schools, we have allowed such activists to supplant the values most parents teach at home.
Then What Do Parents Do?
It is time parents used their influence and networks to create strong private schools and homeschool networks. If the Christian community were serious about raising the next generation to be productive, law-abiding, virtuous people, then every Christian church should consider creating a school using their facility and if they think they’re too small to pull this off, then they should approach other like-minded churches and go in together on such a project.
The first thing to do is to form a board of knowledgeable parents who explore all the options regarding facilities, teachers, tuition, textbooks etc. I will say there are tons of resources online to help those who start private schools that rival the public ones both in terms of academics and extracurricular activities. Moreover, on average, private school students outperform public school students on every measurement.
Then there’s the home school option. Most people don’t know this but there are almost four million homeschoolers in the USA today. Our government can’t stop this movement nor can they compel a student to attend a public school. Home school graduates comprise one of the most sought-after students by top colleges, because they are light years ahead of public-school kids on just about every academic measurement.
Homeschooling comes in many different forms. In some cases, multiple families go in together on this, hiring tutors to cover areas they are not knowledgeable about, and rotating homes where the kids meet. There are homeschool networks in almost every city and state that will help a parent figure out how to do this. Some homeschool networks meet with other homeschoolers, offering plenty of interact
ion with other kids. Indeed, there are even private school athletic leagues that allow homeschoolers to band together and enter their leagues.
Moreover, one of the greatest benefits of homeschooling is that it only requires a few hours a day. When you subtract all the non-academic activities at a public school, there is only about 2-3 hours of real academic learning that takes place. Without all the interference and noise, homeschools can covered the same ground in just a few hours, and then the family can use the free time to go on educational field trips to local museums, tours of factories, etc.
One last word regarding educational-choice legislation or vouchers. When government money is directly involved, it comes with strings attached. Parents need to be wary of any effort to tie their child’s education to laws that demand students learn concepts for which they are not mentally or emotionally prepared, that neglect academics, and that negatively disrupt family-life and even turn students away from God.
Depending on school boards to protect parents’ rights and students’ well-being is a well-intentioned effort, and may still be worth a try. At any rate, the handwriting on the proverbial “chalkboard,” was written long ago: “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6).
Steve Baldwin served as a member of the California State Assembly from 1994-2000. He was the lone conservative appointee to the California Curriculum Commission responsible for selecting textbooks for California’s K-12 schools. From 2000-2009, Steve headed the Council for National Policy as Executive Director, and he is a free-lance writer and author.
A version of this article appeared on the Exodus Mandate website in 2021.