I have a friend who, whenever he makes a boneheaded comment, follows it up by saying, “Don’t blame me – I got a public school education.”
A cheap shot? Well, consider the fact that everyone gets the joke.
And also consider this: If upon making a boneheaded comment he followed it up by saying, “Don’t blame me – I got a private school education,” would anyone get the joke? The answer is no. The reason is simple: The statement is nonsensical – Everyone knows that private schools almost always offer high quality educational services.
And everyone knows that too many of our public schools don’t.
The reason that private schools far outperform public schools is simple and obvious: Private schools compete – and often for profit.
Consider the contrast:
Students who go to private schools do so because their parents got involved in their education, chose a school, and entrusted their money with that particular school with the expectation that that school would earn the money by providing their kids with a quality education. If that private school fails to provide the expected quality service, it loses students and the tuition that is paid for those students – and eventually it goes out of business.
Students who go to public schools do so because of an accident of geography. Their parents did not choose that school for their kids. In fact, in most school systems, parents are prohibited by law from choosing which public school their children attend. Public schools get their students by default and have no meaningful incentive to provide a quality educational service. And if these schools fail to provide a quality educational service, then the kids who attend that school simply don’t get educated. The public schools, as taxpayer-funded government entities, continue in existence providing the same poor services to students year after year into perpetuity.
Do all public schools provide low-quality educational services? Of course not. But those public schools that provide quality educational services do not do so because they are government schools. They do so despite that fact – usually because they are located in a geographical district that includes large numbers of middle- and upper-income families in which the parents take an active role in their kids’ education. How many high-quality public schools are located in our economically-depressed inner cities?
And so, the kids who are most in need of an education that can give them the self-sufficiency that they need to break out of generational cycles of poverty remain trapped in that cycle because our government schools consistently fail them.
Simply put, government-run education is the biggest failed government social program in American history.
Who benefits from this decrepit system? Leftist teachers’ unions and their Democrat Party sponsors. Why? Because, as I have written, leftists will do whatever it takes to increase their own power and to force as many people as possible into their control.
The teachers unions consistently oppose, with all of their considerable resources, every effort to reform the educational system. School choice? Merit pay for teachers? Standards of accountability? All opposed vigorously by the teachers’ unions. Why? Because the teachers’ unions are looking out for the interests of the unions and not the students. Their priority is to increase teacher pay so that the unions can usurp more of that pay in mandatory union dues and then launder that money to the Democrats in state legislatures who vote to perpetuate the system. It is the unholiest of all unholy political alliances in that it sacrifices our kids’ education for the political empowerment of leftists.
And the bonus is that these leftist union teachers get to use their perches in our government school classrooms to spew their leftist propaganda to kids who are required by law to sit in those leftist teachers’ classrooms and thereby train generation after generation of kids to grow up to support their statist political agenda.
Thomas Jefferson, the champion of limited government, was the primary advocate of a public education system. He believed that an educated public was vital to maintaining a free society and a viable representative democracy. However, he would be air-conditioning Monticello from his grave if he saw how leftist teachers’ unions have taken over his beloved public education system and twisted it into a tool to prevent people from gaining the education needed to be self-sufficient and to promote their statist/collectivist political agenda.
So what is the answer? Well, my Bearing Drift colleague Brian Kirwin proposed in the Daily Press this week an “extreme makeover” of public education. I would go further: Instead of a “makeover,” it’s time to start over by scrapping the entire government-run education system and replacing it with a system composed entirely of private educational institutions.
First, it is important to understand that eliminating government-run schools does not mean ending compulsory taxpayer-funded education. To the contrary, I strongly support requiring all kids to receive an education, and I support public financing of education. The one thing I do not support is having government run that system. We’ve given government its chance, and (predictably) it failed miserably.
The answer is to continue to finance the educational system with our means-based tax system and then give every parent a voucher that they can use to send their kids to any school they choose. But unlike the school choice systems that are in place in some communities that give parents their choice of any public school, in the system I propose all schools would be privately run.
Why would eliminating government-run schools in favor of a system of privately owned and operated schools make a difference? Because the private sector always does a superior job to government in identifying and filling public demand. In other words, by leaving it to the private sector, entrepeneurs and philanthropists will be able to establish schools throughout communities that cater to the actual needs of parents and kids in those communities. Schools would be created to provide for the special needs of inner-city and rural students, kids with autism or Down Syndrom, kids whose skills are better suited to vocational or technical work than strict academic work, kids who excel at science or music or writing, kids who don’t learn well through conventional methods but who could excel under other methodologies.
How can we have confidence that such schools will emerge? Because schools will be allowed to operate based on things that incentivize people in the real world – things like a desire to help a particular constituency or – wait for it – profit. Yes, that dirty little word that sends leftists into conniptions is precisely the cure for the educational system that those same leftists have left in shambles.
How do we know that quality schools will be available? Because where there is a demand, the market always provides a supply. In this case, schools will have to provide a quality educational product because parents will refuse to spend their vouchers at substandard schools. Where one school fails, another will appear to compete for those vouchers by offering a superior product. In fact, competition for those valuable vouchers will incentivize schools to take creative approaches to educating kids that will go beyond our wildest imagination in our current stagnant and failing government-run educational system.
It is time for us to decide whether we care more about educating our kids than continuing to sacrifice them for the benefit of the teachers’ unions and their leftist agenda. The future of our country may well depend on it.
