Do we
want school choice or choice schools?
The latter we do not have in general; we do have the opposite: too many
bad schools. When the USA, for all its
expenditure on education, ranks rather low on international tests, there
obtains an indelible indicator. Hence,
we witness the birth of the alternative, charter schools. We’ve always had the
private schools as religious-based or expensive prep types. But they are part of the system, and not what
the ed establishment decries. It is
these new charter schools earning the black grades of some officials.
Know
their talking points*. The following are
typical.
1.
Privatized school choice will inevitably reduce funding for your local
neighborhood public schools.
2.
Direct and disguised vouchers to private schools and other public school
alternatives start small and then expand, increasing the burden on taxpayers.
3.
Additional administrative costs
coupled with a lack of transparency waste taxpayer dollars and open the door to
excessive legal and fraudulent personal gain.
Basically,
these amount to just one statement, one claim, and one right
from the US educational cartel: “The
public funds are ours, and we want all of them.” Never do the talking points discuss the
public school excellence. Instead, they demonize, detract, and deride the
upstart alternatives.
Our
current public school system has delivered to us arbitrary curriculum changes,
massive testing, teachers having insufficient knowledge, principals protecting
their jobs, unions protecting teachers, parents interfering with the learning
process, students refusing to study, and superintendents caving into ridiculous
demands. Inner cities, needing
excellence the most, have deferred progress to civic leaders expecting the
least - except more funding. All these
items are not cheap, as the USA pays per student $12,731/year
for each young person (grades 9-12) in
the system — more than all but four other
countries (Norway, Luxemburg, Switzerland, and Austria) according to a recent
OECD report.** At the post- secondary level, the annual expenditures
per FTE student is more than $26,600, 79% higher than the OECD average.
We
could say our public school system has a champagne budget giving us cheap beer.
Make no
doubt, many charter schools are not that good, but the publicly-funded
competition in case after case is worse.
Secretly, I’m generally for public schools, but many are so bad that
perhaps a little competition might help.
According to The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education,
more than half of the students entering college require remediation courses.
The claim that more money will fix the problems has been tried for decades,
with little success.
In our
post-modern world, there are two ways to confront competitive opposition. Meet it and get better or legislate it out of
existence. Which shall it be?
Comments
Post a Comment
Please Comment.