I read the fine article kindly submitted here and a great many of the comments here before commenting. First of all, the headline of this submission (which is the original article headline, and thus expected by Hacker News rules) is a misstatement of fact. The author of the submitted article is a Virginian who has been teacher of the year at his little-known high school, but NOT the "Virginia Teacher of the Year."[1] The exaggerations go on from there.

The author writes, "But public education is painted as a career where you make a difference in the lives of students. When a system becomes so deeply flawed that students suffer and good teachers leave (or become jaded), we must examine how and why we do things." Well, yes, but he could have asked different questions, and come up with the different answers earlier reached by John Taylor Gatto, a New York State Teacher of the Year decades ago.[2] Teachers should never kid themselves about how much the school-system-as-such is designed to enable learners to learn well. That has hardly ever been its main purpose.

Meanwhile, I have seen some examples of helpful reforms where I live. Virginia needs to catch up with all those reforms. Minnesota, where I now live and where I grew up, has had largely equal per-capita funding for public school pupils statewide since the 1970s. The state law change that made most school funding come from general state appropriations rather than from local property taxes was called the "Minnesota miracle."[3] Today most funding for schools is distributed by the state government on a per-pupil enrollment basis.[4] You don't have to live in a wealthy neighborhood in Minnesota to have adequately funded schools in your neighborhood.

The funding reform in the 1970s was followed up by two further reforms in the 1980s. First, the former compulsory instruction statute in Minnesota was ruled unconstitutional in a court case involving a homeschooling family, and a new compulsory instruction statute explicitly allows more nonpublic school alternatives for families who seek those. Second, the Legislature, pushed by the then Governor, set up statewide open enrollment[5] and the opportunity for advanced learners to attend up to two years of college while still high school students on the state's dime.[6] And Minnesota also has the oldest charter school statute in the United States.[7]

Parents in Minnesota now have more power to shop than parents in most states. That gets closer to the ideal of detecting the optimum education environment for each student (by parents observing what works for each of their differing children) and giving it to them by open-enrolling in another school district (my school district has inbound open-enrollment students from forty-one other school districts of residence) or by homeschooling, or by postsecondary study at high school age, or by exercising other choices.

The educational results of Minnesota schools are well above the meager results of most United States schools, and almost competitive (but not fully competitive) with the better schools in the newly industrialized countries of east Asia and southeast Asia. It's a start. More choices would be even better. (P.S. Many of these school system reforms in Minnesota were sponsored and championed by supporters of the state's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, but most are also supported by Republicans here too. Choice is good for everybody and helps schools have incentive to improve.)

[1] http://www.doe.virginia.gov/teaching/recognition/

[2] http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html

[3] http://www.mnhs.org/library/tips/history_topics/18public.php

[4] http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/hrd/pubs/mnschfin.pdf

http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/SchSup/SchFin/index.html

[5] http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/EnrollChoice/index.h...

[6] http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/CollReadi/PSEO/index...

[7] http://www.amazon.com/Zero-Chance-Passage-Pioneering-Charter...