When will education learn?

If you listen to the current debate over school funding in Wyoming, you might think the crisis just showed up.

It didn’t.

What we are seeing right now — staff reductions, shrinking districts, budget shortfalls — is not the result of a single legislative session, a single caucus, or a single political decision. It is the result of decades of avoidance, posturing and blame.

And yet, here we go again.

School districts are blaming the Legislature. The Wyoming Caucus is blaming the Freedom Caucus. Advocacy groups are blaming whoever happens to be on the other side of the argument.

Everyone involved in the debate in Wyoming is pointing fingers, and nobody is taking responsibility. That needs to stop, because the truth is, Wyoming is not alone.

Families are making different choices about education than they did even five years ago, and as a result, school districts across the country are making the same kinds of cuts as the ones you are seeing in Weston County and across the Cowboy State. Technology has made homeschooling more accessible. Online education has expanded options. Parents are no longer locked into a single system, and many of them are choosing something different.

I see it firsthand. The school district I work for in Colorado — in a community about the size of Newcastle — just cut 15 positions. The larger district my wife works in cut dozens more.

This is not a Wyoming problem. It is a reality problem, and pretending otherwise is a disservice to the very students and families everyone claims to be fighting for.

But instead of adapting to that reality, too many leaders in Wyoming are trying to fight it — and trying to convince you that someone else is to blame for it. That’s not leadership. It’s deflection, and it is a perfect example of the manner in which politicians and bureaucrats try to pit us against each other to protect their own agendas instead of finding a third side that will actually serve your
best interests.

It is time to muzzle the blame-gamers and acknowledge that the real issue is that our public education system was built for a different time, a different population and a different set of expectations. For decades, Wyoming poured resources into that system with a mistaken emphasis on “accountability” instead of results, and waged political battles over funding that distracted from the need to evolve.

We spent more, muddied the waters to produce confusion instead of clarity and completely lost sight of the needs of the families and communities we were supposed to serve. Now we are surprised by the outcome, and the architects of this travesty are hoping we are foolish enough to double-down on the strategies that brought us to this point.

Organizations like the Wyoming School Boards Association and the Wyoming Education Association have spent years protecting the status quo. Like many large organizations, they are also susceptible to the dangers of group-think — where consensus becomes more important than creativity and where dissent is discouraged rather than explored. The Wyoming Department of Education has played its role also by consistently defending its own bureaucracy at the expense of the people it was supposed to serve.

That kind of environment rarely produces innovation, and almost always resists the very change that is necessary to adapt, and I have to take responsibility for my own short-comings in this arena. I spent 12 years on the school board trying to push for better outcomes and less bureaucracy, but I cannot point to any meaningful, lasting impact my efforts had on this system. The situation we see today — a decade after I left — is evidence of my own failure.

If we want to disrupt this cycle of futility, Wyoming’s leaders need to fully embrace school choice instead of resisting it. That means providing vouchers or other funding mechanisms that allow families to choose alternatives to traditional public schools, but it also means we should build a system that allows families to use public education in the ways that actually work for them. A student should be able to take core classes online, attend their local school part-time, and travel to another district for specialized programs if that district offers something better.

Funding should follow the student — not the system. Districts should be compensated for the services they provide, not the students they simply count.

And yes, districts should have to compete. Competition drives improvement. It rewards innovation. It forces institutions to respond to the people they serve, and one of the biggest problems in public education is the lack of it.

Wyoming is uniquely positioned to lead this transformation because we are small enough to adapt quickly and we have enough resources to invest strategically. We also have communities that still care deeply about their schools and their kids, but none of that will matter if we keep doing what we’ve always done.

Blaming the Legislature won’t fix it. Blaming one caucus or another won’t fix it. Pretending this is a new problem won’t fix it.

What will fix it is a willingness to take responsibility, to acknowledge reality and to build something better.

That requires courage from school boards. It requires honesty from legislators. And it requires accountability from the Department of Education. Most importantly, it requires the people of Wyoming to demand all three.

This is a moment of opportunity — if we choose to see it that way.

We can cling to a system that no longer serves our families and communities well, or we can build one that does.

We can’t get there by pointing fingers at the other side, but we will get there by moving forward — from the Third Side.