As my head spins from hearing the new “Smart Snack” guidelines, collecting eclipse-viewing permission slips, and ease teacher concerns about MAP tests and EOCs for the coming year, I can’t help but sigh.

We are at a fork in the road.

When it comes to “solutions” to the problems facing America’s public education system, most people with an opinion seem to be coalescing into two camps. The first group supports nationally-standardized objectives. Many (but not all) of these folks would support the logical next step of nationally-standardized course curricula. The second group would like to implement more “free-market” strategies into public education, like school choice voucher programs, teacher evaluation and retention models based largely on students’ standardized test scores, and the growth of the charter school movement.

While these two groups see themselves at opposite ends of a spectrum, they’re far more alike in their underlying philosophies than they realize.

There are certainly good ideas to be considered from both groups, but where the philosophy goes bad in both is what they fundamentally assume about our education professionals: they aren’t good enough.

The logical outworking of the first group is standardized curriculum binders that are handed out to “curriculum administrators” at the beginning of the year. These people can’t really be called “teachers” because they don’t have to know anything about teaching methods, learning styles, or developmental psychology - they just have to do what the next page in the binder tells them to do. The qualifications for this job would be something like a glorified substitute teacher. And in the digital age, the binder will be replaced by virtual school curricula produced by a private company and adopted by state school boards that would allow students to earn degrees without necessarily interacting with another human.

On the other side, education professionals will spend an increasingly large percentage of their time trying to figure out what is on the standardized test and work frantically and fearfully to make sure their students cram down enough information in time for them to accurately regurgitate it. If not, those teachers need to find another profession or go work for a charter or private school where they can learn to do it “right”.

The threat of losing your job because of students’ performance on a test and being forced to teach a standardized curriculum are, in essence, the same thing. Both communicate the inability of a person who has gone to at least four (more often six) years of school to design and implement their own curricula and assessments. Both assume an inability of school administrators to make sure teachers are doing their jobs. Both assume that local school boards in local communities can’t make the best decisions for their own children.

The real issue is too many competing interests making rules that restrict the freedom educational professionals have to do their jobs, and in the end, we all suffer.

Maybe the best thing we could do for American public education is back off.