America’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association, supplies the “professional educator” with a Code of Ethics, which includes the stipulation that he or she “shall not assist a noneducator in the unauthorized practice of teaching.” In the normal world that we all inhabit, teaching happens all the time, so it takes quite the presumption to claim that any of it, except what is done against parents’ wishes, is “unauthorized.” But that is the issue at the heart of the fight over charter schools: the power to decide who may teach what to which children, the power to ennoble or corrupt them, now in large measure lies with education bureaucracies. Left out of these decisions are well-intentioned, caring adults who have a better idea of what these children need—be they the unlicensed teachers with advanced degrees who have found a home in top charter schools, or even those parents who, in homeschooling their children or in selecting a non-government school for them to attend, “engage in the unauthorized practice of teaching.”

At root of this strange ethic is the belief that a child belongs first to the state, or at least to its temporary surrogate, the education system. The school is determined in advance by the family’s neighborhood, the funds that are allocated based on the child’s attendance belong to the district, and the responsibility for teaching him or her everything from reading to advanced physics to questionable elements of political ideology lies with the system’s so-called