Education Reform: Why America Needs a David Cameron
The vision and courage needed to take on the crisis of failing schools has surfaced during our presidential campaign—just not in this country.
Last week, addressing his party for the first time since re-election in May, U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron called for an end to the country’s traditional public school system, endorsing instead a nationwide conversion to academies, which are essentially the British equivalent of charter schools—publicly funded, but with greater freedom over what they teach and how they are run.
He also urged current and would-be educators across the U.K.—parents, community groups, social service organizations—to create small new academies known as free schools.
“So my next ambition is this,” Cameron told a nationally televised audience, “five hundred new free schools. Every school an academy…and yes—local authorities running schools a thing of the past.”
It may be difficult for Americans to appreciate Cameron’s radical, uneuphemistic boldness. He hopes to replace a state bureaucracy that is even more entrenched, more sclerotic, than its American cousin.
The second-term Conservative sees defenders of the educational status quo—members of Parliament, teachers unions, and the local authorities that run British schools—as apologists for a class system that has denied opportunity to generations of British children.
“Here,” Cameron observed, “the salary you earn is more linked to what your father got paid than in any other major country.” Cameron believes the U.K. will not continue to thrive unless it draws from a far wider stream of talent and experience than ever before.
In a rational world, hosannas might greet a head of state who used his power to reduce inequality. Instead, Cameron’s intensifying efforts over the five years preceding his speech have elicited fierce resistance and criticism.
When Parliament passed his 2010 legislation giving any school the option of Education Reform: Why America Needs a David Cameron - The Daily Beast:
