EDUCATION

As a father of three children, I’ve personally witnessed a lot of the challenges in our education system, not just in North Carolina but everywhere we’ve lived as a military family. Schools are too crowded, and the average teacher-to-student ratio is close to 30:1 in many schools. We cannot expect one teacher to adequately teach our children when he or she has up to 30 kids to manage, teach, mentor, keep safe, and educate. The long-term answer is to increase the number of schools or expand the existing school infrastructure. To accommodate this, we must pay teachers a better, more suitable for what they are doing, salary. Teachers teach because they love what they do, that is evident. They need to be compensated for the true reality of what they are doing for future generations of Americans.

I support school choice for the near term and an enduring solution. You shouldn’t have to be in a certain school district just because of your zip code. What if that school is too crowded, or impacted by gangs or violence, drugs, and CRT? Parents should be allowed to let their children earn an appropriate education to help them succeed in life. An education free from crime, poor policies, overcrowded student population, underfunding, low test scores, and just a substandard environment. Competition is healthy, that is something we also learn in school. Competition to provide children with an education will improve standards and therefore improve the education of our children.

The Department of Education should either be eliminated or have its authoritative reach severely limited when it comes to the individual states and how they teach. Too often bad policies are enforced at the state level because the federal government threatens funding without cooperation. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for education across our country. The states and parents should be the ones determining what is best for their children and classrooms.

Our children should be taught how to think and solve problems, they need to learn skills that will help them succeed in life. They do not need to be taught what to think, nor should they be indoctrinated with societal trends that are inappropriate or immoral. K-12 students are children, minors, who need protection from the insanity occurring with our adults in America.