State Superintendent of Education Hank Bounds' plan to restructure public schools includes taxpayer-funded pre-Kindergarten, improving the quantity and quality of teachers and administrators, and increasing the rigor of the curriculum.
If anybody can make a plan work, Hank Bounds is the one to do it - and, he has some good ideas. But before we spend millions of dollars and disrupt the entire public school system in order to implement his ideas, we ought to try them on a smaller scale to make sure they will work in practice as well as in theory.
The way to do that is to allow new schools to be created where everyone going into those schools knows and buys into this new way of doing things. In other words, instead of forcing all students to try these new ideas, let's see if they work with the most motivated people - those who agree with the goals.
We can do that by changing Mississippi's charter school laws to resemble those of most other states, where charter schools are thriving. To learn more about charter schools, go to our website, mspolicy.org.
Dr. Bounds has some ideas that sound good. But before we implement them on a broad scale, let's make sure they'll work.