Financing entrepreneurial education

Unfortunately, education has become a highly politicized issue, making it difficult to simply outline the problem and propose workable solutions. Today, education is a battleground fought between taxpayers, politicians, educators, bureaucrats, unions and corporations — with children trapped in the middle. Although opponents in the battle to reform education disagree on many issues, there is one solution that is gaining ground on both sides of the political divide: school decentralization.

For several decades, school districts, state legislators and the federal government have made numerous efforts to improve the quality of education. Through no shortage of good intentions, their efforts have woven thousands of complex rules into an oppressive net that forces teachers and administrators to focus more on complying with regulations than on the education of students. Today we worry more about what level of money is spent than how much students learn.

"Today's school finance systems fund programs, employ staff, sustain institutions and provide resources so that district and school administrators can faithfully execute the thousands of laws and regulations that have grown up around public education," noted the flagship report of the nationwide School Finance Redesign Project. But this complex patchwork of occasionally conflicting laws incentivizes a system that is "focused on maintaining programs and paying adults, not on searching for the most effective way to educate our children."

Read the rest of "Financing entrepreneurial education: Part I" here.