The complex problems in education require a variety of innovative solutions

Scanning through the education policy and political headlines is an exercise in chaos.

“Early stats don’t support school cellphone bans.” “Want high schoolers to read books?” “Preventing hazing is harder than you think.” “Is your online student a bot?” “Stop generation Alpha’s brain rot.”

It’s a litany of problems with precious few solutions, and the solutions that do make it into the mix face immediate second-guessing. It’s apparent to me that no single authority can possibly resolve all of the problems plaguing K-12 education today. And even if that authority somehow did exist, nobody would believe them anyway.

With no obvious national policy solution to stuttering national test scores and literacy rates, it seems clear that experimentation — together with empowering parents to choose among an array of schools with different teaching and curriculum styles — is the best path through the chaos.

There are three reasons for this. First, and most obviously, children are not all alike and they never have been. Some learn best in strict, highly predictable environments; others flourish in less structured, Montessori-style settings. This is obvious even for very young children, which explains the multitude of preschool philosophies from which parents can choose. Bizarrely, granting parents an array of choices for preschool is not controversial, but granting them the same array of choices for K-12 school is controversial.

Pressing all K-12 students into the same educational environment may have made good sense when the option was simply school or no school. But that’s no longer the case and hasn’t been for many years. Parents deserve options for their children’s schooling because not all children flourish in the same environment, and the more options the better.

Second, options such as public charter schools operate outside the standard, uniform strictures of the traditional public school bureaucracy. In short, they experiment. This is good, and I believe we need more of these innovative schools. Successful models might be adopted by others.

Take the Classical Schools of America operated by Roger Bacon Academy in North Carolina as an example. These charter schools utilize a “classical” style of education, and it works. Stanford University’s landmark national study on public charter school performance highlighted Roger Bacon Academy as one of the country’s “gap-busters” — schools that have “eliminated learning disparities for their students.”

Mississippi is another fine example of the power of experimentation. The state spent years at the bottom of student literacy rankings. Then they were a first-mover in the burgeoning “science of reading” curriculum movement, and their students flourished in what’s now called the “Mississippi Miracle.” States around the nation, North Carolina included, are copying Mississippi’s example.

Third, experimentation and parent empowerment seem the best path toward deescalating the hyper-partisanship surrounding education policy. I actually believe inflamed passions are good from time to time — people care deeply about how the next generation is educated, and it shows.

But entrenched divides should not persist forever. With broad disagreement among policymakers at every level of government, deferring to parents — and giving them choices — will turn down the temperature. Insisting that parents accept a single educational option will not.

Embracing educational diversity is not a retreat from excellence but a route toward it. The challenges facing K–12 education are too varied, too complex, and too deeply personal right now to be solved with one-size-fits-all policies.

Empowering families with educational choice and encouraging schools to innovate offers a way to meet students where they are and help them thrive. If we want better outcomes for the next generation, we must stop seeking a single perfect system and instead create space for many good ones to grow.