What About Our Public Schools?
There are parents of school age children across the country justifiably upset about the condition of the public schools in their communities. These parents voice their disapproval at politicians and social influencers. The politicians, they say, can’t manage to set educational policy in a way that raises student performance measures. (They say: Enhancing performance takes money that we don’t have!) Social influencers care less about academic standards than they do in promoting particular social behaviors. (They say: The schools should be turning out patriots! The schools should be turning out independent thinkers!) The influencers include many outside community and outside groups trying to push a particular agenda. They are collectively rarely on the same page.
Increasingly, parents are also taking aim at educators themselves. They worry teachers and school administrators about policy issues, preferring to tell the educators what and how to teach. (They say: Our kids only need to know how great this country is. Our kids need to know when the country has failed people.) Students themselves are caught in the middle of all the fussing and pay the real price — they stop seeing the value of education. The net result is that everybody involved with schools and schooling has something to complain about — and complain they do.
Students like the option to choose their own courses and the ways they want to be taught — that’s nothing new, of course. It’s just human psychology for children to feel they know what’s best for themselves. In the not so old days, society believed that motivated and educated teachers could navigate the perils of child psychology to appropriately educate kids in the things they needed to give them the incentive to be productive and capable citizens.
In West Virginia, where we’re losing population, especially in the coal counties, not only are the schools low performing, they’re actually going bankrupt and even closing down. For those schools it’s poverty that’s the root of the problem.
Our counties are not doing well by a lot of conventional measures of well-being. They’re not just poor, they’re poorly educated, unhealthy, living in decaying housing, with high unemployment, with few prospects. It’s no surprise that all this weighs on the residents’ mental and emotional health. And so, community diseases like drug addiction, child neglect, spousal abuse are all too common. This paints a bleak picture, but it’s not a hopeless one.
Even in communities not mired in coal culture, schools everywhere in the state seem equally afflicted with many of the same problems — the meagerness of the resources needed to provide quality. By state law every county, rich or poor, has to pay its teachers the same rate, and that rate is pitifully low in comparison to all our surrounded states. So good teachers often leave.
The Republican dominated government has essentially washed its hands of the public school problem and decided, against our constitutional mandate, to smother schools or starve them. They have caved to the demands of disaffected parents who understandably don’t want their kids educated in ways that don’t make them more productive.
Our legislature and governor have come up with a “solution,” calling for the slow death of public schools in favor of paying parents directly to take their kids out and and home school them or send them to private schools. They created the HOPE Scholarship program, which pays parents over $5000 a year to provide their kids with a non-public school education.
HOPE feeds on the belief that parents know better than teachers and librarians what their children need to learn. To make the case, they add that parents can do a better job of teaching their kids or finding alternatives to the public school system to teach them. This to a large extent is a belief that conservatives, rich conservatives, are pushing to decrease the importance of the liberal agenda they see dominating public schools. And they’re spending their money to influence elections of school boards, county commissions, and legislatures.
For the following school year 20,000 requests (so far) have been made and the program is now offered to all students, including those doing well in public schools. The total budget to support these parents approaches $300 million, including program overhead, money that will not be spent on public school improvement. Whether it will result in higher achievement is an open question. What we don’t know from the HOPE program is much about the quality of the education these kids will receive.
West Virginia, like most states, has a state Department of Education that sets educational standards and sets measures of achievement. These include not just curriculum compliance, but achievement test performance, attendance, and disciplinary statistics. Through local educational departments, it also provides help with the baseline components needed to better assure educational success: school lunches, physical activity, extracurricular activities, transportation, teacher training, counseling, nursing, phys ed, and special education instruction planning. In other words, it’s a lot more than just classroom instruction.
All of what happens in a public school, happens through the concerted and coordinated effort of people who have chosen education as a profession, experienced people who have appropriate credentials to do what they’re paid to do. Not without reason it seems the HOPE Scholarships are called that because they “hope” that home schooling and private schooling can provide equivalent knowledge and skills to what a school network provides.
On the surface that looks a little iffy.
Does a single parent actually have the knowledge, the pedagogical skills, the patience, the discipline, the objectivity to know what to do? To bring their child or children up to the levels that state educational standards require? Sure, of course, some will, but just as surely some won’t. And we can’t predict ahead of time which parents will or won’t be able to be successful. Further, because assessment of the HOPE program is pretty lax, we won’t know how well they will or won’t succeed.
HOPE is a big, expensive hoping and wishing program and it’s eroding the chances of actually fixing the problems with the public schools. It’s almost an admission that public schools can’t be saved. If our government believed they can’t, why spend tax money to keep them going? It’s hard not to believe sometimes that our government, in fact, wants to destroy public schools. There’s the evidence of the Koch Brothers and other conservative donors from out of state spending money in local election in West Virginia to favor people who do not believe in the good public schools can deliver.
Here’s the simple reason why we should fight back. Public schools are incubators for cultural cohesion. This idea is encapsulated in the U.S. Constitution as part of the goal of creating a more perfect union. It’s hard to imagine a perfect union coming about when everyone is taught differently on what’s important to put in and what’s chosen to leave out. Public education is a safeguard against splitting neighbors and communities apart.
Though the U.S. Constitution is mute on the subject of schooling, every state constitution mandates some form of publicly funded education. In the case of WV, we require “a thorough and efficient system of free schools.” All of this is weaselly language because there are few concessions made to the reality that not all localities in the state will have the same view of what thorough and efficient mean, especially as thoroughness and efficiency are tied to money and how it’s spent.
Our state ranks among the highest in proportion of residents on Federal relief and insurance programs — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, free and reduced-price school lunches. In short, says our Republican dominated legislature, there’s not the money needed to maintain, let alone improve schools. So, absent the money, our legislators are fulfilling our state Constitutional mandate to public education by tossing the problem to parents who home school or to subsidize tuition at private schools.
The people who stay here and raise their families here are grounded in their allegiance to their place and to their families and their history. They’re admirable people and many are proud of the schools they have, seeing them as cultural anchors for their communities and trusted stewards of their children.
Education should not be the poor child in the state budget, but HOPE guarantees that that child will stay poor. It’s misguided to think we’re going to reverse our population decline and attract new residents by ignoring the value of public education. That will not happen.
This article was originally printed in the Spirit of Jefferson on April 30, 2026.
