Taxpayer should hold the right people accountable for education

With all the talk about education funding in the Texas legislature, here’s my question: Why should school districts be saddled with accounting for decisions that are simply not theirs to make.
For a close to home example, take Bullard. Last spring, I watched in fascination as Bullard ISD received a lower than expected rating due to drop out rates.
Really? And just who makes the decision to drop out?
In a flurry of accounting and research, the Bullard ISD was able to prove that of the unaccounted for students, some had transferred and some were homeschooling. On appeal, the official rating was raised. Unofficially, everyone in Bullard knew what was obvious; I have interviewed countless people who volunteer that they moved to Bullard for the excellent public schools.
Most the East Texas home educators I know - and I know plenty because I have homeschooled along the way – would view it as an intrusion of their God-given rights to have the public school district come sniffing around.
Imagine how intrusive it would seem, if you had already enrolled your child in another town far away? Weird.
Burdening the school district with the need to track down private citizens and get information from them about personal decisions is just plain silly. It is also an expensive and time-consuming task that distracts from the real responsibility of educating those who show up for class.
Education is the function of the school system. Truancy, juvenile delinquency, and child protection are functions of the justice system.
The truth is, education is a function of the family, but that’s a whole ‘nother column.
As citizens, we owe it to ourselves to get that straight.
One of the symptoms of the entitlement culture we’ve become in America, is the confusion about personal responsibility.
When we let our legislators pass laws that hold the wrong people responsible for actions, like holding districts responsible for the decisions of parents and their children, we are behaving in a very co-dependant way as a culture. As if someone could control the behavior of another individual or be held responsible for decisions they did not make.
Anyway, do we really want our ISDs used in a semi-law-enforcement kind of way, investigating private citizen’s lives?
No wonder students get the idea that they have a right to an education. They think they are entitled because taxpayers are not voting with clarity on this issue.
Make no mistake, though, education is a privilege, not an entitlement.
Cathy Primer Krafve, aka Checklist Charlie, lives and writes with a Texas twang. Comments are invited at checklistcharlie.blogspot.com.