North Dakota’s legislature is considering it.

I guess I don’t have much of a problem with all-day kindergarten per se.  I think the kids can handle it, and parents who think they’re kids aren’t ready for all-day kindergarten can always delay their child’s enrollment by a year.  It would be a significant addition to the education budget, though, and we’d have to determine whether or not that additional cost would be worth it.

My only problem with it is that the supporters seem to be pushing it as a way to help schools perform better, and I’m just not sure it will.  It would help, I’m quite sure, but the results can’t be more than marginal.  After all, how much change can a few extra hours of class make at such a young age?  Especially given the cost.

This sounds suspiciously like the sort of “let’s improve education” initiative that teachers and teacher unions favor.  The sort that means more teachers hired and more dues for the unions.  But we’ve been throwing money at education issues for years now, largely with marginal impact.  Certainly demands for more education funding never die down.

If we really want to improve the quality of education students in this state get we need to change the conditions where public schools have a monopoly and teacher performance can’t be reflected in teacher pay.  School vouchers are the way to improve education.  Instituting such a program would ensure that our tax dollars are spent more efficiently, and that schools/teachers do a better job of educating our kids as they compete with one another to attract them.  It would also cause more education options to crop up for parents as private schools set up shop to compete for the voucher money.

And vouchers would allow controversial issues like all-day versus part-day kindergarten to be solved on an individual basis.  Each parent could choose a school that best fits their child.

Personally, I’m a bit tired of the same-old-same-old, throw-money-at-it solutions for education issues.  The time has come for a fundamental change in how we run our schools.  Utah recently passed legislation that implements a voucher system.  I think political leaders around the country should be paying close attention to how they work in that state.