By Billy McCullers
After attending a lengthy School Board meeting, representing three hours of my life I’m never getting back, I want to say I agree with something:
The public school system has a public relations problem.
Not because of social media.
It has a public relations problem because hundreds of thousands of parents have looked at the educational options available to their families and quietly said, “No thank you.”
That should be a moment of self-reflection.
Instead, too often it becomes a moment of resentment.
Listen to the conversations surrounding school choice, and you’ll hear it. Home-educating families are portrayed as unrealistic. Private school families are accused of abandoning public education. Parents who choose something different are treated as though they have somehow betrayed the system.
But perhaps the better question is this: What happened that caused so many parents to lose confidence in the first place?
Nobody wakes up one morning hoping to rearrange their entire lives around homeschooling. Nobody volunteers to pay private school tuition while simultaneously paying taxes to support a public school they no longer use simply because it sounds fun.
Parents make those sacrifices because something convinced them it was necessary.
Some wanted an education tailored to their child’s unique strengths and weaknesses.
Some wanted a safer environment.
Some wanted higher academic expectations.
Some wanted their family’s values to play a larger role in their children’s education.
Some simply became tired of watching bureaucracy consistently win over common sense.
And yes, there are families like mine.
My wife and I never believed we should co-parent with the government.
We never believed decisions about our children’s formation should gradually migrate away from the family and toward institutions whose priorities are inevitably shaped by politics, regulation, litigation, and public opinion.
That doesn’t make teachers the enemy.
Many teachers are extraordinary people trying to do extraordinary work inside a system that increasingly prevents them from doing what they entered the profession to do.
But somewhere along the way, public education began behaving less like a service to families and more like an institution that expects families to conform to it.
Students move when bells tell them to move.
They learn what schedules permit.
They advance at the pace of the group.
They are measured by standardized metrics.
Parents are expected to trust decisions made increasingly farther away from their own kitchen table.
That model works for some.
It never worked for ours.
The irony is that school choice advocates are constantly accused of undermining public education.
Parents didn’t create public education’s image problem.
Every family that leaves is feedback.
Every private school enrollment.
Every scholarship application.
Every parent willing to make enormous financial and personal sacrifices to educate their own children is casting a vote of confidence somewhere else.
Businesses pay consultants millions of dollars to understand why customers leave.
Public education often responds by criticizing the customers.
Until that changes, no amount of additional funding, marketing campaigns, or political messaging will repair what is fundamentally a crisis of confidence.
Parents have not rejected education.
They have rejected a system that too often stopped listening to the very families it exists to serve.
Perhaps that is the conversation worth having.
Bill McCullers is an Okeechobee County resident.
