Education
One thing is certain: West Virginia's K-12 schools are currently failing. There are not enough teachers, children's scores on national achievement tests rank near the bottom, and far too much emphasis is placed on rectifying behavioral issues of students rather than teaching them. Further, the legislature seems more concerned with issues like: whether or not to allow the teaching of Intelligent Design (sure -- in Debate Class, not Science), whether schools should be required to post "In God We Trust" all over the place, how much class disruption is required before a student can be suspended, and ensuring that transgender girls can't participate in girls' sports.
All that said, the problems with public education in this state are very real, and draining public funding from public schools and shifting it over to charter schools, microschools, and learning pods is not going to fix them. Neither will lowering the requirements for teachers and substitute teachers, nor removing testing and oversight from home schooled children. What to do?
Let us start with what the goal of education should be: to teach children to function to their maximum potential in our modern society. Already this says that school should include instruction on far more than just reading, writing and arithmetic. It also implies home schooling, learning pods, microschools, and charter schools will fall short of the mark, in particular because those forms of education do not require students to interact with all walks of life, as it were. We need, fundamentally, to transform education and how it is delivered. The current system was developed over 100 years ago, and it is woefully inadequate for the challenges we face in the 21st century.
Transformations of this magnitude are never easy. Fortunately, there are experts who have already started thinking about them. West Virginia's educators should read their works, and formulate a plan to achieve a world class educational system. If we build it, people will come to this state. This will revive our economy, as well as produce the 21st century workforce employers are looking for. Here are a couple of resources
Education Reimagined and, in particular, their vision.
What seems to be clear is that:
Busing kids to large (school) buildings is not serving our students or communities well (hence the push for home schooling, learning pods, charter schools and the like, misguided as those may be)
Grouping kids into classrooms by age isn't working (kids clearly develop at different rates and have differing backgrounds that must be accounted for)
Online learning has the potential to rectify some of this, but computer access is lacking and some students have trouble learning online (but the latter is a skill, and it can be taught!)
Assigning teachers to a single, physical school is not optimal (if there are not enough kids to support, say, a full time music teacher, why not share a music teacher among multiple 'schools' -- online classrooms, smaller physical buildings, even non-traditional venues)
I am not an educator. I am not the one to lead this charge to change. I am the one to help enable it! If elected, I will work to move the thinking on education forward in leaps and bounds, rather wasting precious resources and time on figuring out how we can, for example, add more religion into public schools without violating the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, or discriminate against transgender kids without actually calling it that.