Choosing education

America's system of public education has earned an extraordinary distinction in comparison to the public schools of our international competitors. Only in America do we commit such egregious malpractice against our children that they actually get dumber every year they remain trapped in the public school monopoly. Public schools suffer the same defense as members of Congress: "They're all terrible except for mine." As I am a candidate for Congress and a product of American public schools, I feel I have an obligation to speak truth to power. Your public school and your Congressional representative are - statistically speaking - probably both dismal failures, and for the same reason: neither is truly accountable to constituents. The similarities are striking, if not terrifying:

* Political forces largely outside the control of citizens and voters establish districts that rarely have anything to do with serving the public, but frequently have everything to do with maintaining monopoly power.

* In Congress, members gerrymander their districts to insulate themselves from competitive elections.

* In public schools, bureaucrats set neighborhood school boundaries that prevent competition among schools.

* We measure inputs rather than results.

* In Congress, increasing budgets are the most important measure of a program's power and success, regardless of whether the program accomplishes anything, whether it's necessary, or even if the program is counterproductive.

* In public schools, supporters equate greater quality with increased funding, despite the absence of any statistical correlation between increased budgets and improved outcomes.

* Failure results in more funding.

* In Congress, failed programs are never the result of bad ideas, implementation, or employees. They are always the result of too little funding.

* In public schools, illiteracy, dropouts, declining test scores, and the inability to match wits with our international peers are never the result of bad curricula, bad teachers, or bad instruction methods. They are always the result of bad parents, unreasonable expectations, and too little funding.

* The leaders follow fads without any evidence that their path will take them where they want to go.

* In Congress, legislators and committees use the rule of magpies - they find something bright and then they land on it. This is why Congress holds endless hearings about issues that belong on "Entertainment Tonight" and "Dateline" rather than about issues that really matter to citizens.

* In public schools, the curriculum is so dedicated to political correctness, new math, and whole language learning that it has escaped the attention of professional educators that our children do not know whether the phrase, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need," comes from Thomas Jefferson or Karl Marx; how to read a food label, make change, or balance a checkbook; and, how to read, spell, and write.

* Our best and brightest flee with alarming speed and regularity.

* In Congress, voters commonly complain that they rarely have the opportunity to choose among candidates that excite or enthuse them.

* In public schools, teachers with the highest ratings for generating positive educational outcomes among their students rarely work more than five years before leaving the field entirely.

* When we are unsatisfied with the outcomes, we have few alternatives and very little recourse.

* In Congress, because of gerrymandered voting districts, earmarking, and the financial and promotional advantages of incumbency, lawmakers are virtually guaranteed re-election.

* In public schools, our only option is to move our children to private schools, at our own expense, because parents have virtually no influence over institutions that serve bureaucrats, politicians, and unions rather than students. To add insult to injury, even if we can afford private school tuition, we still have to pay property taxes for a service we found so dissatisfying that we abandoned it.

I believe that universal public education is essential. Universal public education is essential for developing engaged citizens, critical thinkers, and an advanced economy. It's an investment in our children, our country, and our future. But, like any investment, we can make wise or poor decisions about where to allocate our resources. Today, and for a generation or more, we make very poor decisions.

This is not unusual in a socialized system - a system in which public servants allocate investments on behalf of a public they supposedly represent. In reality, the central planners who control education investments respond to politics rather than the needs of our children. The reason is simple and understandable: the public education system survives on the largesse of a political system, rather than on the dollars and needs of its customers.

The bureaucrats in the federal and state departments of education are as hopelessly out of touch as the bureaucrats who tried to centrally plan the economies of the failed communist countries. Without any information about which outcomes are actually relevant, they rely on the only information they have - how much money they spend. The Federal government made an effort at remedying this bizarre situation with mandatory testing in the tragic "No Child Left Behind" law. Unfortunately, NCLB allows each state to decide how to conduct that testing. The result is entirely predictable: state political and education leaders manipulate the tests and their definition of "passing grades" to comply with the Federal mandates and secure the Federal funding. So, rather than finding out whether our children are learning anything, we find out how bureaucrats have to adjust the "passing grade" each year to make sure that it reflects "adequate yearly progress."

The solution to this Kafkaesque comedy of manners is simple, radical, and painfully controversial: allow parents and children to decide which school they want to attend. Only by allowing this kind of choice - using the public funds we already allocate to universal education to permit families to choose the right school, the right teachers, the right instruction method, and the right curriculum - will we be able to convey to schools the infinite range of variables necessary to make wise investments. In the same way that entrepreneurs strive to build better mousetraps, to deliver better products at lower costs, to respond to the unique demands of 300 million Americans - entrepreneurs will respond to educational choice with a veritable mall of choices that meet the needs of the real consumers of universal public education.

Putting more money into a system that doesn't work will not make the system work. The incentives to perform in today's public education system are set by people who have an interest in securing more power and more money, and the people responding to those incentives are accountable to the politicians and bureaucrats who set them. Only educational choice will make schools accountable to the constituents who matter - our children.

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REISMAN ON EDUCATIONAL DECLINE:

In my book "Capitalism", I explain a root cause of the collapse of contemporary education in terms of its essential, guiding philosophy. Here is my explanation. It begins with a quotation from W. T. Jones, a leading historian of philosophy. The quotation describes the philosophy of Romanticism, which appeared as a hostile reaction to the Enlightenment:

To the Romantic mind, the distinctions that reason makes are artificial, imposed, and man-made; they divide, and in dividing destroy, the living whole of reality-"We murder to dissect." How, then, are we to get in touch with the real? By divesting ourselves, insofar as we can, of the whole apparatus of learning and scholarship and by becoming like children or simple, uneducated men; by attending to nature rather than to the works of man; by becoming passive and letting nature work upon us; by contemplation and communion, rather than by ratiocination and scientific method. (W. T. Jones, Kant to Wittgenstein and Sartre, vol. 4 of A History of Western Philosophy, 2d ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1969), p. 102.

The Romantics held that "we are nearer to the truth about the universe when we dream than when we are awake" and "nearer to it as children than as adults." (Ibid., p. 104.) The clear implication of the philosophy of Romanticism is that the valuable portion of our mental life has no essential connection with our ability to reason and with the deliberate, controlled use of our conscious mind: we allegedly possess it in our sleep and as children.

In its essentials, the philosophy of Romanticism is the guiding principle of contemporary education. Exactly like Romanticism, contemporary education holds that the valuable portion of our mental life has no essential connection with our ability to reason and with the deliberate, controlled use of our conscious mind-that we possess this portion of our mental life if not in our sleep, then nevertheless as small children.

This doctrine is clearly present in the avowed conviction of contemporary education that creativity is a phenomenon that is separate from and independent of such conscious mental processes as memorization and the use of logic. Indeed, it is an almost universally accepted proposition of contemporary pseudoscience that one-half of the human brain is responsible for such conscious processes as the use of logic, while the other half is responsible for "creativity," as though, when examined, the halves of the brain revealed this information all by themselves, perhaps in the form of bearing little labels respectively marked "Logic Unit, Made in Hong Kong" and "Creativity Unit, Made in Woodstock, New York." Obviously, the view of the brain as functioning in this way is a conclusion, which is based on the philosophy and thus interpretative framework of the doctrine's supporters.

Now, properly, education is a process by means of which students internalize knowledge: they mentally absorb it through observation and proof, and repeated application. Memorization, deduction, and problem solving must constantly be involved. The purpose is to develop the student's mind-to provide him with an instantaneously available storehouse of knowledge and thus an increasingly powerful mental apparatus that he will be able to use and further expand throughout his life. Such education, of course, requires hard work from the student. Seen from a physiological perspective, it may be that what the process of education requires of the student through his exercises is an actual imprinting of his brain.

Yet, under the influence of the philosophy of Romanticism, contemporary education is fundamentally opposed to these essentials of education. It draws a distinction between "problem solving," which it views as "creative" and claims to favor, and "memorization," which it appears to regard as an imposition on the students, whose valuable, executive-level time, it claims, can be better spent in "problem solving." Contemporary education thus proceeds on the assumption that the ability to solve problems is innate, or at least fully developed before the child begins school. It perceives its job as allowing the student to exercise his native problem-solving abilities, while imposing on him as little as possible of the allegedly unnecessary and distracting task of memorization.

In the elementary grades, this approach is expressed in such attitudes as that it is not really necessary for students to go to the trouble of memorizing the multiplication tables if the availability of pocket calculators can be taken for granted which they know how to use; or go to the trouble of memorizing facts of history and geography, if the ready availability of books and atlases containing the facts can be taken for granted, which facts the students know how to look up when the need arises. In college and graduate courses, this approach is expressed in the phenomenon of the "open-book examination," in which satisfactory performance is supposedly demonstrated by the ability to use a book as a source of information, proving once again that the student knows how to find the information when he needs it.

With little exaggeration, the whole of contemporary education can be described as a process of encumbering the student's mind with as little knowledge as possible. The place for knowledge, it seems to believe, is in external sources-books and libraries-which the student knows how to use when necessary. Its job, its proponents believe, is not to teach the students knowledge but "how to acquire knowledge"-not to teach them facts and principles, which it holds quickly become "obsolete," but to teach them "how to learn." Its job, its proponents openly declare, is not to teach geography, history, mathematics, science, or any other subject, including reading and writing, but to teach "Johnny"-to teach Johnny how he can allegedly go about learning the facts and principles it declares are not important enough to teach and which it thus gives no incentive to learn and provides the student with no means of learning.

The results of this type of education are visible in the hordes of students who, despite years of schooling, have learned virtually nothing, and who are least of all capable of thinking critically and solving problems. When such students read a newspaper, for example, they cannot read it in the light of a knowledge of history or economics- they do not know history or economics; history and economics are out there in the history and economics books, which, they were taught, they can "look up, if they need to." They cannot even read it in the light of elementary arithmetic, for they have little or no internally automated habits of doing arithmetic. Having little or no knowledge of the elementary facts of history and geography, they have no way even of relating one event to another in terms of time and place.

Such students, and, of course, the adults such students become, are chronically in the position in which to be able to use the knowledge they need to use, they would first have to go out and acquire it. Not only would they have to look up relevant facts, which they already should know, and now may have no way even of knowing they need to know, but they would first have to read and understand books dealing with abstract principles, and to understand those books, they would first have to read other such books, and so on. In short, they would first have to acquire the education they already should have had.

Properly, by the time a student has completed a college education, his brain should hold the essential content of well over a hundred major books on mathematics, science, history, literature, and philosophy, and do so in a form that is well organized and integrated, so that he can apply this internalized body of knowledge to his perception of everything in the world around him. He should be in a position to enlarge his knowledge of any subject and to express his thoughts on any subject clearly and logically, both verbally and in writing. Yet, as the result of the miseducation provided today, it is now much more often the case that college graduates fulfill the Romantic ideal of being "simple, uneducated men."

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Educating illegal aliens drains money from American kids

PTA parents: welcome to America 2006. Your child wants to play football or play in the school band or on the soccer team. Well you already know you have to dig a little deeper into your wallet due to school budget cuts. While the cost to parents handling out cash in order to keep their children in these extra curricular activities keeps going up, another part of state educational budget is actually exploding because those dollars are being diverted to educating illegal alien children because of an ill-conceived and little known 1982 U.S. Supreme Court Case called Plyer v. Doe.

What would a poll of parents in small towns, urban or rural elementary schools, middle schools or high school meeting rooms across America's Heartland find? What do you think they would answer if asked about having to pay out of pocket for more school programs for their kids while normal tax dollars go toward skyrocketing educational opportunities for illegal aliens? Illegal aliens - people who are in this country ILLEGALLY but whose children our tax dollars are supporting.

Until the U.S. Supreme Court decision is overturned it may not even matter. The Supreme Court Plyer v. Doe decision created a U.S. Constitutional Equal Protection right for illegal aliens that is not found in the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. By fabricating a right for illegal aliens - the court's own language eliminated - a right of our own children's equal protection which is now being obliterated. The U.S. Supreme Court held "The deprivation of public education is not like the deprivation of some other governmental benefit. Public education has a pivotal role in maintaining the fabric of our society and in sustaining our political and cultural heritage; the deprivation of education takes an inestimable toll on the social, economic, intellectual, and psychological well-being of the individual, and poses an obstacle to individual achievement"

Does it not stand to reason that the Plyer v. Doe decision has caused grievous harm to American children in what the U.S. Supreme Court said would be the exact result if public education dollars were withheld from illegal alien children? After 24 years with illegal aliens and their children (whose numbers are growing exponentially) crushing our state and local education budgets we must correct this misdirected and misapplied constitutional decision by the U.S. Supreme Court by going to the heart of the Plyer v. Doe decision. It seems clear that a new call to arms should be blaring loudly in PTA meetings everywhere that are dotting the landscape of our nation.

America, it must happen now because the economic impact of this decision is staggering! Billions of educational dollars from local school programs are stealing opportunity from American kids and their families and it is simply not just. According to the Federation for Immigration Reform, "The total K-12 school expenditure for illegal immigrants costs states nearly $12 billion annually, and when the children born here to illegal aliens are added, the costs more than doubles to $28.6 billion." For example, children of illegal immigrants in California - who represent nearly 15% of the kindergarten through 12th grade public school students - are costing PTA parents and other taxpayers $2.2 billion annually to educate illegal immigrant students in those grades. That's enough to pay the salaries of 41,764 teachers or 14% of California's teachers!

Our American educational budget is not simply on a slippery slope it is in an avalanche from the crush of paying for illegal alien children. The educational budget deficit free fall has to stop and the knee jerk budget give-away bonanza has to cease. That is not the American way nor is it the American Dream that our children should be forced to accept. True, we are a nation built upon immigrants - people who came here legally and are proud to have sacrificed much to do so. They abided by the rules so that the nectar of the American Dream would be that much sweeter, that much more meaningful, and that much more satisfying. The legal immigrant followed the rules and proudly swore allegiance to his or her new nation. Many legal immigrants fought against all odds in many ways, came to this country to escape crushing poverty, and to make a better life for themselves and their families. And they did it legally.

The noble concept of the American Dream has been hijacked in plain view of every American who takes the time to see that our laws that protect legal citizens should be stretched and compromised to fit the illegal alien who boldly crosses the border with his pregnant wife and children in tow who does not understand - or care - that there is a double standard in play. This double standard allows the illegal alien from Mexico to be fed, clothed, educated, employed and even defended because our nation of laws and rules don't apply to him and his fellow Mexican illegals. The exception, of course, is if the immigrant has the misfortune to be originating illegally from countries like Haiti, China, Africa, India, Italy, or any other nation.

But this protected class of illegals gladly expects our nation to use its city budgets to take money away from our kids' classrooms, take housing dollars away from our own poor. This double standard is not fair to our own hard-working single-parent households who live from paycheck to paycheck and who also have a dream, yes, a legitimate American Dream backed by the Constitution and guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. American citizens understand that if their American-born or legally naturalized son or daughter studies hard enough, works hard enough, and keeps his or her grades high that he may have the opportunity to go to college or to a trade school or own and build a small business. The protection of this dream is why we have immigration laws designed to accommodate only a certain number of immigrants from other countries.

The solution is in Section One of the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment, which states: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside." It must be fully litigated now. In addition the U.S. Supreme Court must overturn the 1982 U.S. Plyer v. Doe decision. The outcome will allow for the renewed preservation of America's educational integrity. The new result in Plyer v. Doe would erase the Burger Court surrender of the U.S. Constitution to political correctness at the expense of American children's educational future.

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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"

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