“Mistakes can be corrected by those who pay attention to facts, but dogmatism will not be corrected by those who are wedded to a vision.” This truth by the great economist Thomas Sowell applies to most of the problems we face in American society today but to none greater than the dire situation facing American education.

One doesn’t need to look far to see the sorry state of our educational system. The first worrisome fact comes from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which found that the United States ranks 24th out of the 34 OECD countries in math and science scores. Just as troubling is that U.S. government spending on government schools, adjusted for inflation, has more than doubled since 1986, and yet math, reading and science scores have remained stagnant. 

At the same time, teachers have had absurd protections unique to the education industry that have held children back. The most notorious protection is the collection of “due process rights” for tenured teachers in the firing process. What that amounts to is essentially this: if you’re a school administrator, don’t ever try firing a teacher. Because union rules regarding firing have so many steps and are so strenuous that it takes years to remove incompetent, remiss teachers.

In Chicago, that process takes 2 to 5 years. In New York, a city with similar union rules, the Daily News reported that between 2007 and 2010, only 88 out of 80,000 city schoolteachers were fired for incompetence and poor performance. Reason magazine documents the necessary union rules to fire a teacher in the Big Apple with a comprehensive, two-page chart with many, many steps.

These rules and regulations extend to the dangerous limits of the logic behind due process for teachers, with instructors guilty of committing sexual misconduct being placed in so-called “rubber rooms.” For years, teachers have been paid full benefits and salaries not to work in place of being fired because the process is so unimaginably difficult due to union rules, all in the name of due process from arbitrary firings. Ironically enough, the due process sought by teachers led to the removal of due process for students wanting a good education.

In New York, for example, four teachers, dubbed the “Foul Four” for having a history of  sexual misconduct perpetrated in the classroom, still to this day receive $363,271 in total a year with supplementary pension and health benefits in these “reassignment centers,” according to the New York Post.

Defenders of the status quo, however, are persistent in following the liberal dogma, arguing that raising teachers’ salaries would solve the problem of inept tenured instructors by incentivizing talented and skilled individuals to become teachers.

Yet theorizing that big government can solve problems created by big government is not grounded in reality. Presently, tenured teachers, many of whom are incompetent and underperforming, working on a nine-month basis, already earn on average $58,170, more than plumbers and pipefitters, chemical plant system operators, real estate appraisers and assessors and forensic science technicians and just slightly less than police officers, sheriff’s deputies and electrical and electronics drafters, according to Forbes columnist Jeffrey Dorfman, citing governmental wage data. This salary is also well above the national average of $46,440.

Dorfman also concluded that if teachers worked the same amount as everyone else, their salaries would average out to $72,000 to $77,000 per year, a salary comparable to those of chiropractors, network and computer systems administrators and other professionals. And this is without accounting for pension and healthcare benefits.

Besides the salary figures, this proposed panacea does little to address the problem of what to do if and when bad teachers haven’t done their jobs well.

With sky-high federal spending on education, as well as attractive compensation levels and nearly airtight job security for teachers, dogmatism on education has been tried, followed and executed extensively throughout the past decades, and, most importantly, it has failed.

To the objective bystander, something has to change. And yet, our Democratic politicians invested in perpetuating the status quo never fail to fail us.

In this case, Democratic politicians and the big-moneyed American Federation of Teachers union, the 10th most prolific spender on American elections since 1989 that actively opposes charter schools, have together fixated on continuing a vision for education that would have collapsed decades ago if proper competitive forces were allowed to produce a better product in the free market.

In the Democratic Party Platform for America, talk is mostly focused around “ensuring that every child in America has access to a world-class public education so we can out-educate the world,” platitudes signifying more of the same. While talk of expansion of charter and other types of schools was mentioned, the silence has been deafening from most Democrats every time National School Choice Week, an annual week dedicated to celebrating the diversity of choice of schooling, comes around again.

To keep their slowly dissolving dream alive, the politician-union conglomerate has engaged in behind-the-scenes chicanery that has effectively monopolized education, consequently perpetuating bad schooling for the next generation across the country. Or so it seems.

The truth is that, while bad public schooling is still dominant in many parts of the country, a revolutionary concept is sweeping the nation: the concept of school choice.

It’s the idea that education is the civil rights battle of our era, and, as such, taxpayer money for education should follow children, especially poor inner-city blacks and Hispanics, rather than be dispersed and allocated by incompetent, bloated bureaucracies.

It’s the idea that parents know best—that they should be empowered with taxpayer dollars to choose the school that is best for them rather than allow bureaucrats to be the deciders of their children’s futures.

It’s the idea that no child should have to go home devastated after not being selected to attend a great charter school in lotteries that attract thousands upon thousands of disadvantaged families from across cities, hoping to escape failing public schools.

It means celebrating an all-of-the-above approach towards education by inspiring different types of schools and teaching styles to compete. We need to bring a better service to the marketplace, incentivized by having a system where taxpayer money is taken away from the hands of bureaucracies and put into the hands of families in the form of vouchers and charter schools to expand choice and counterbalance the near monopoly that is public education.

The best part is that there is data already available to evaluate this emerging trend. The results of charter schools in New York, for instance, are promising.

According to a 2013 piece by the New York Times editorial board, “a study published earlier this year shows that the typical New York City charter student learned more reading and math in a year than his or her public school peers.”

More generally, charter school students were found to have scored, on average, higher on both math and reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress than their public school classmates by 17 and 16 points, respectively. By the way, keep in mind that charter schools receive 30 percent less funding per pupil than public schools do.

But more so than just charter schools, vouchers for education have also produced very encouraging results. A study published in the Brookings Institute in 2012 found that, for African Americans in New York City, using a voucher to attend private school increased college enrollment by 24 percent. More broadly, the study found that there were “significant increases in full-time college attendance, enrollment in private four-year colleges, and enrollment in selective four-year colleges.”

These are the results we need expanded across the nation, especially when considering that the status quo just does not work for those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. What does work is inspiring, exciting and innovative instruction, organization and leadership that profoundly affects students and revitalizes the classroom.

Even though this year’s National School Choice Week just passed, the fight for school choice must remain relentless, and reformers must stay resolute. At the end of the day, that is the only way to ensure that education in America works for all students. Choice, in the end, is freedom, and everyone deserves a shot at that.