Friday, September 08, 2006

Schools need competition now

This week's back-to-school ads offer amazing bargains on lightweight backpacks and nifty school supplies. All those businesses scramble to offer us good stuff at low prices. It's amazing what competition does for consumers. The power to say no to one business and yes to another is awesome.

Too bad we don't apply that idea to schools themselves. Education bureaucrats and teachers unions are against it. They insist they must dictate where kids go to school, what they study, and when. When I went on TV to say that it's a myth that a government monopoly can educate kids effectively, hundreds of union teachers demonstrated outside my office demanding that I apologize and "re-educate" myself by teaching for a week. (I'll show you the demonstration and what happened next this Friday night, when ABC updates my "Stupid in America" TV special.)

The teachers union didn't like my "government monopoly" comment, but even the late Albert Shanker, once president of the American Federation of Teachers, admitted that our schools are virtual monopolies of the state -- run pretty much like Cuban and North Korean schools. He said, "It's time to admit that the public education system operates like a planned economy, a bureaucratic system in which everybody's role is spelled out in advance and there are few incentives for innovation and productivity. It's no surprise that our school system doesn't improve. It more resembles the communist economy than our own market economy."

When a government monopoly limits competition, we can't know what ideas would bloom if competition were allowed. Surveys show that most American parents are satisfied with their kids' public schools, but that's only because they don't know what their kids might have had! As Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek wrote, "[C]ompetition is valuable only because, and so far as, its results are unpredictable and on the whole different from those which anyone has, or could have, deliberately aimed at."

What Hayek means is that no mortal being can imagine what improvements a competitive market would bring. But I'll try anyway: I bet we'd see cheap and efficient Costco-like schools, virtual schools where you learn at home on your computer, sports schools, music schools, schools that go all year, schools with uniforms, schools that open early and keep kids later, and, who knows what?

Every economics textbook says monopolies are bad because they charge high prices for shoddy goods. But it's government that gives us monopolies. So why do we entrust something as important as our children's education to a government monopoly? The monopoly fails so many kids that more than a million parents now make big sacrifices to homeschool their kids. Two percent of school-aged kids are homeschooled now. If parents weren't taxed to pay for lousy government schools, more might teach their kids at home. Some parents choose to homeschool for religious reasons, but homeschooling has been increasing by 10 percent a year because so many parents are just fed up with the government's schools.

Homeschooled students blow past their public-school counterparts in terms of achievement. Brian Ray, who taught in both public and private schools before becoming president of the National Home Education Research Institute, says, "In study after study, children who learn at home consistently score 15-30 percentile points above the national averages," he says. Homeschooled kids also score almost 10 percent higher than the average American high school student on the ACT.

I don't know how these homeschooling parents do it. I couldn't do it. I'd get impatient and fight with my kids too much. But it works for lots of kids and parents. So do private schools. It's time to give parents more options. Instead of pouring more money into the failed government monopoly, let's free parents to control their own education money. Competition is a lot smarter than bureaucrats.

Source






Modern education is anti-majority

We have an interesting situation in a nearby town. A male high school science teacher has begun the process of changing his gender. He informed school officials of his intention last Spring. He has not undergone any of the necessary operations yet. As part of the process, this teacher, who has been at the school for a number of years and is known by the students as a man, will begin dressing as a woman this September when school starts. The district said okay.

The district has now held workshops and meetings for parents and faculty, and will hold one for students the first day of school. So people will understand and accept what is happening.

Parents have the option of requesting that their children not be in this teacher's classroom. A few have. A number of parents have voiced support of the teacher and what he is doing. Those who are not comfortable with the situation have been silent for the most part. But a few who did speak up say they were afraid to say anything because they might be thought prejudiced or be subject to backlash. And they say they know a number of other people who don't like it, but haven't spoken up. But saying that a lot of people oppose it is not the same as those people coming forward. I have no way of telling how many people oppose it. A local columnist, though, did take an informal poll. 71 % of the respondents said the teacher should be fired.

Right, fire a tenured teacher? Obviously they don't know the power of the teacher's unions. (I am a teacher, by the way.) Generally the only way to oust a tenured teacher is if he or she commits a crime. And sometimes even that that is not enough. This does not qualify.

Still, the usual procedure in situations like this - as rare as they are - is for the teacher to transfer to a different school or district where he is not known by his original gender. For his own good and the good of the students. It's not clear why this teacher did not do that. Maybe he just felt more comfortable and supported at the school. Or maybe he is trying to make a statement.

I'm not concerned here with the morality of his decision to change genders. But I have been thinking about his decision to stay in the school and the decision of the district to offer all these workshops and meetings to engender acceptance. And then I remembered an appropriate G. K. Chesterton passage. From "The Outlawed Parent" in What's Wrong with the World:

"Modern education means handing down the customs of the minority, and rooting out the customs of the majority."

Ah. People who switch genders certainly qualify as a minority. And this sure seems like Modern Education at its most typical.

Source

***************************

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"


Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here

***************************

No comments: