Your child’s future comes before institutional interests

Your child's education should not be the thing an institution sacrifices to solve its own problems. If teacher competence becomes inconvenient to establish, that doesn't make competent teaching less necessary. If a union wants more money or political power, that isn't automatically the same thing as your kid needing better instruction. And if some children are ready for advanced work, removing their opportunity doesn't make everyone else better educated. These are different decisions, but I object to the same principle underneath them: the learner is expected to accommodate the institution.

New Jersey made a concrete change with its 2024 teacher-certification law, effective January 1, 2025: the general requirement for a commissioner-approved basic reading, writing, and mathematics test was removed, with exceptions for limited certificates. That did not abolish every qualification or show that teachers cannot read. It did remove a particular demonstration parents could point to. If the test was unnecessary or poorly designed, explain how the remaining route establishes competence. The child still needs somebody who can read closely, write clearly, and explain the mathematics they are teaching.

San Francisco gives us a different institutional decision. After the February 2026 teachers' strike, SFUSD and United Educators of San Francisco announced a tentative agreement on February 13 covering compensation, family healthcare, and special-education support. Some of those changes may improve the conditions in which children learn; the district explicitly made a recruitment case. But an agreement is not the educational result. Families should be able to examine whether staffing, support, and instruction improve after the money is committed, rather than be asked to equate the union's negotiating success with their own child's progress.

A salary agreement and a union's political spending are separate questions. If we want to know whether a negotiation helped children, follow the staffing, support, and instruction it was meant to improve. If we want to criticize political spending, use evidence about that spending. Conflating them weakens the accountability claim by asking the wrong flow of money to prove it.

Treating children with equal dignity doesn't mean pretending they have the same abilities or interests. If one is ready for advanced mathematics, give them advanced mathematics. Taking that opportunity away doesn't teach another child fractions more effectively; it just makes the education worse for a different student. We should widen access to challenge and examine selection fairly, but we should refuse the idea that exceptional ability is a problem to be flattened. Education ought to develop excellence wherever it appears, rather than make everyone wait for permission to differ.

New York City's 2026 admissions information still describes Gifted and Talented programs. The existence of those opportunities matters, as does the question of who can enter them. A policy should be judged by which challenges it preserves, widens, or removes, and what happens to the child who needs them. If a capable student was overlooked, repair the route into advanced work. Removing demanding instruction from another child does not itself repair that exclusion, and celebrating a more uniform arrangement would conceal the cost to the learner.

The advantage of homeschooling is that a family can act on these distinctions. Choose instruction for its competence, judge a resource by what it supplies, and give a strong interest more demanding work. Your kid shouldn't have to wait for a political compromise to permit the next challenge. Educational freedom lets the person come before the arrangement.

A policy is not successful because it advances a political principle in the abstract. Ask what it leaves available to the child who needs reading instruction, a harder mathematics course, or more individual attention. Institutions and unions can have legitimate interests, but those interests do not erase the learner's claim on a useful education. Their future should be the standard by which we judge the arrangement, including the alternatives we build.