As a native of Albemarle County, I am quite connected to the local school system, known as Albemarle County Public Schools or ACPS. Growing up, ACPS was known for its accepting community and strength of education, while not making the environment overly competitive or toxic. However, as a result of bureaucratic changes in recent years, ACPS has gone from being the sort of school system that one might want to move to and instead a place from which they would want to leave. And while I'm glad that I have escaped the horrid nature of the current school system, my sister is still trapped in it, giving me a reason to still feel invested.
The full story of what has recently happened with ACPS is a long one, so the short of it is that as a result of new policies that are being pushed through by bureaucrats, "half of all county schools failed to achieve acceptable state accreditation ratings in the last year." The head of this, or the Senior Bureaucrat as Niskanen might say, is Superintendent Matthew Haas. When the voters signed a petition to prevent his contract from getting renewed, his office blamed the School Board instead. This problem is most certainly of the principal-agent variety, seeing as parents put their kids in school to get an education, and they vote for members of the School Board to put in place policies that agree with their ideals. Somewhere along the road, something appears to have been lost in translation, to the point that the bureaucrats are openly hostile to the voters, who are the people who are indirectly putting them in power in the first place.
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