There’s nothing quite like watching the right discover the virtues of deregulation.

It’s rather like finding out your accountant has suddenly embraced minimalism—first, you’re suspicious, then impressed, and finally you wonder why it took them so long to realise that having seventeen different forms to claim a stapler was perhaps not the path to organisational nirvana.

Idaho—yes, that Idaho, famous for potatoes and a refreshing absence of pretension—has just done something marvellous. They’ve taken their charter school laws, which were about as streamlined as a Rube Goldberg machine designed by a committee of bureaucrats with a grudge, and performed what can only be described as regulatory liposuction. The result? They’ve gone from having the 14th weakest charter school laws in America to cracking the top ten, all by deciding that perhaps—just perhaps—schools that actually work should be allowed to get on with the business of educating children without filling out Form 27B/6 in triplicate.

The Manhattan Institute has chronicled this transformation in meticulous detail, and the lessons for Australia are so obvious that only a Canberra policy adviser could miss them.

The Procrustean Problem (Or: Why Bureaucrats Make Terrible Tailors)

The Greeks, who gave us democracy and the unfortunate habit of arguing about it for three millennia, also gave us the story of Procrustes. This chap ran an ancient Airbnb where every guest had to fit his iron bed. Too short? He’d stretch you. Too tall? He’d start amputating. The Idaho charter school commission had been running the same racket for 25 years, squeezing every school—brilliant, mediocre, or catastrophic—into identical regulatory straitjackets.

High-performing schools that had been educating children successfully for decades were treated with the same suspicion as fly-by-night operators who thought “pedagogy” was a type of Greek sandwich. Virtual schools, which emerged during the pandemic like digital lifeboats, were forced to comply with regulations designed for buildings with leaky roofs and questionable asbestos. The commission had what they call an “adversarial attitude,” which is bureaucratic shorthand for treating success as something that needs to be punished until it can be properly controlled.

Earned Autonomy: A Revolutionary Concept (Or: Rewarding Good Behaviour)

What Idaho realised—apparently after 25 years of incremental twiddling that produced 84 amendments and not much else—was that perhaps schools that prove they can educate children should be allowed to, well, continue educating children.

Revolutionary, I know. Try not to faint.

The Accelerating Public Charter Schools Act (APCSA), which sounds like something a committee would name their coffee machine, actually contains a profoundly sensible idea: earned autonomy. High-performing schools now qualify for 12-year renewals instead of the standard six. They can fast-track replication—what Idahoans call “TSA pre-check for successful schools”—rather than going through the full security theatre every time they want to open another campus.

This is what happens when you stop treating every institution like it’s guilty until proven innocent. The legislation even included a “pilot charter” provision, allowing genuinely innovative schools to operate for three years on a trial basis. If they fail, they fail quickly and cheaply. If they succeed, they succeed. It’s almost as if they’ve discovered the concept of risk and reward, which has been troublingly absent from education policy since approximately forever.

The Repeal-and-Replace Miracle (Or: How to Lose 27 Pages and Find Your Soul)

Here’s where it gets really interesting. Idaho didn’t just amend their charter school laws. They didn’t add another 84 amendments to the existing 84 amendments. They performed what Americans call a “repeal and replace”—a phrase that usually makes one’s blood run cold, but in this case produced something marvellous.

They eliminated 13,476 words. That’s 27 pages of regulatory treacle, gone. They stripped the charter commission of its rulemaking authority, turning it from a quasi-legislative body into what it should have been all along: an authoriser and overseer. Policy changes now require actual legislation, which means actual debate, which means actual accountability.

The legislation even changed the opening sentence of the law from putting teachers first to putting students first. Subtle, perhaps, but telling. The old formulation was a political compromise designed to avoid upsetting the education unions. The new one says: We’re here for the kids. Everyone else can adjust accordingly.

What This Means for Australia (Or: Why We’re Still Screwed Without Reform)

Now, before you start writing letters to the Australian Education Union suggesting they take up potato farming, let’s consider what this means for us.

Australia’s education debate is currently stuck in a loop that would make Groundhog Day look like a model of progress. We have a binary choice between taxpayer-funded government schools that operate like Soviet tractor factories and private schools that charge fees requiring a second mortgage. The middle ground—charter schools, autonomous public schools, whatever you want to call them—barely exists.

Idaho’s experience shows that regulatory permission structures matter. When you make it easier for good schools to operate, you get more good schools. When you force every institution into the same Procrustean bed, you get an education system that’s been stretched and amputated until it fits nobody’s needs.

The concept of “earned autonomy” is particularly relevant here. Australian schools are drowning in compliance requirements that assume malfeasance rather than competence. We have endless reporting, accountability frameworks, and “quality assurance” processes that consume administrative time while producing approximately nothing of value. Yet schools that consistently deliver excellent outcomes are forced to jump through the same hoops as schools that can’t seem to teach children that fire is hot.

The Political Lesson (Or: Why Bipartisanship Isn’t Dead, Just Resting)

Here’s the really delicious part: Idaho’s reform passed the House 66-3 and the Senate 32-1. That’s not a typo. In an America so polarised that people can’t agree on whether the sky is blue, Idaho managed to produce near-unanimous support for deregulation and school choice.

How? By focusing on what works. By rewarding success rather than micromanaging failure. By trusting parents to make decisions about their children’s education—a radical concept that, oddly enough, most parents rather like.

The Australian political class could learn something here. Our education debates are dominated by institutional interests: unions, bureaucracies, tertiary education faculties that still think Vygotsky is cutting-edge. The idea that parents might know what’s best for their own children is treated with the same suspicion that Idaho’s charter commission once reserved for successful schools.

But as Idaho shows, when you put students first, when you reward performance, when you strip away regulatory overreach, you can create something that even politicians can agree on. And more importantly, you can create schools that actually educate children.

The Bottom Line (Or: Why Bureaucrats Shouldn’t Be Allowed Near Children)

Idaho’s charter school reform is a masterclass in what happens when you stop confusing process with outcomes. They’ve realised that 25 years of incremental amendments produced a system so complicated that only bureaucrats could love it, and bureaucrats, as it turns out, make terrible educators.

The lesson for Australia is simple: trust, but verify. Then reward success and get out of the way.

We don’t need more regulations. We don’t need more compliance frameworks. We don’t need another review into education that produces a report so thick it could stop a bullet.

We need what Idaho has just built: a system that assumes schools want to educate children, that parents know what’s best for their families, and that success should be rewarded rather than regulated into mediocrity.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to buy a potato farm. Apparently, they’re doing marvellous things in Idaho.