Friday, July 06, 2007

Do Away With Public Schools

Here's a good question for you: Why have public schools at all? OK, cue the marching music. We need public schools because blah blah blah and yada yada yada. We could say blah is common culture and yada is the government's interest in promoting the general welfare. Or that children are the future. And a mind is a terrible thing to waste. Because we can't leave any child behind.

The problem with all these bromides is that they leave out the simple fact that one of the surest ways to leave a kid "behind" is to hand him over to the government. Americans want universal education, just as they want universally safe food. But nobody believes that the government should run nearly all of the restaurants, farms and supermarkets. Why should it run the vast majority of the schools - particularly when it gets terrible results?

Consider Washington, home of the nation's most devoted government-lovers and, ironically, the city with arguably the worst public schools in the country. Out of the 100 largest school districts, according to the Washington Post, D.C. ranks third in spending for each pupil ($12,979) but last in spending on instruction. Fifty-six cents out of every dollar go to administrators who, it's no secret, do a miserable job administrating, even though D.C. schools have been in a state of "reform" for nearly 40 years.

In a blistering series, the Post has documented how badly the bureaucrats have run public education. More than half of the District of Columbia's teenage kids spend their days in "persistently dangerous" schools, with an average of nine violent incidents a day in a system with 135 schools. "Principals reporting dangerous conditions or urgently needed repairs in their buildings wait, on average, 379 days ... for the problems to be fixed," according to the Post. But hey, at least the kids are getting a lousy education. A mere 19 schools managed to get "proficient" scores or better for a majority of students on the district's Comprehensive Assessment Test.

A standard response to such criticisms is to say we don't spend enough on public education. But if money were the solution, wouldn't the district, which spends nearly $13,000 on every kid, rank near the top? If you think more money will fix the schools, make your checks out to "cash" and send them to me.

Private, parochial and charter schools get better results. Parents know this. Applications for vouchers in the district dwarf the available supply, and home schooling has exploded.

As for schools teaching kids about the common culture and all that, as a conservative I couldn't agree more. But is there evidence that public schools are better at it? The results of the 2006 National Assessment of Educational Progress history and civics exams showed that two-thirds of U.S. high school seniors couldn't identify the significance of a photo of a theater with a sign reading "Colored Entrance." And keep in mind, political correctness pretty much guarantees that Jim Crow and the civil rights movement are included in syllabi. Imagine how few kids can intelligently discuss Manifest Destiny or free silver.

Right now, there's a renewed debate about providing "universal" health insurance. For some liberals, this simply means replicating the public school model for health care. (Stop laughing.) But for others, this means mandating that everyone have health insurance - just as we mandate that all drivers have car insurance - and then throwing tax dollars at poorer folks to make sure no one falls through the cracks.

There's a consensus in America that every child should get an education, but as David Gelernter noted recently in the Weekly Standard, there's no such consensus that public schools need to do the educating. Really, what would be so terrible about government mandating that every kid has to go to school, and providing subsidies and oversight when necessary, but then getting out of the way?

Milton Friedman noted long ago that the government is bad at providing services - that's why he wanted public schools to be called "government schools" - but that it's good at writing checks. So why not cut checks to people so they can send their kids to school?

What about the good public schools? Well, the reason good public schools are good has nothing to do with government's special expertise and everything to do with the fact that parents care enough to ensure their kids get a good education. That wouldn't change if the government got out of the school business. What would change is that fewer kids would get left behind.

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No easy higher educational choices in Britain

I suspect that the circumstances described below may generalize well beyond Britain. I must say that I always dreaded the thought that my son might want to follow me into the social sciences -- so I was quite delighted when he decided to become a mathematician

The news that one in four lawyers wants to leave the profession because of the stress and long hours reminded me of the (rather grand) party I attended recently where the partner of a law firm confided earnestly that his biggest fear was that his children would decide to follow him into his career. The very important media person I was with said he was rather worried because his son was toying with the idea of going into journalism. The MP who had joined our conversation said that he certainly intended to discourage his own children from entering politics. And my husband, a doctor, said he was grateful every day for our daughter's stated intention never to go into medicine. So there we had it. Four successful professionals, hard-working, well-educated, all of whom thought so little of their own careers that they were determined their own children should not go into them.

We pointed out to the lawyer, not without spite, that he lived in a vast house and enjoyed fabulously expensive holidays. Ah yes, he said glumly, but the hours are relentless, the people dismal and the work very dull. Besides, he added, money isn’t everything. His gloom is echoed by the survey this week of 2,500 lawyers, who say that despite record levels of pay (coincidentally, another survey this week revealed that top lawyers in big City law firms now charge £1,000 an hour), there is widespread unhappiness at their poor work-life balance.

There is no doubt that journalism has its drawbacks, and so, obviously, has politics. Both professions madly envy the lawyers their oodles of dosh, and while we would never go so far as to agree that money isn’t everything (it tends to be people who already have plenty of money who agree with that proposition; you won’t hear it from someone whose stomach is acid with the fear of not paying the mortgage or the electricity bill), we can comfort ourselves that at least our careers have their moments of fun and occasional glamour.

The professionals with real grounds for grievance are doctors. The current jobs fiasco, presided over by the newly resigned Health Secretary, Patricia Hewitt, means that with less than a month to go before new training posts start on August 1, 11,000 junior doctors don’t know whether they have a job. The term junior doctor refers to anyone not yet a consultant. Of those who do have posts, hundreds will have to relocate to take them, moving homes, uprooting children from schools and forcing spouses to change jobs – all for a position guaranteed at most for one year and often only six months before the merry-go-round begins again.

These are people who were the brightest and hardest working at school; you don’t get to study medicine with much less than three A* these days. They then endured six years of medical school before taking their first bottom-rung jobs, working relentless hours with little sleep. They are now embarking on their chosen speciality, for which they will have to pass two or three stages of gruelling and demanding exams, and for which they must study while also working long and antisocial hours.

Those who survive will then be told by the chattering classes and the media that they should be grateful to have a “job for life” (until they make one mistake and kill someone, that is) and that they earn ludicrously “good” money (although not by lawyers’ standards, obviously). In most other countries in the world, a child’s ambition to become a doctor is greeted with pleasure and, frequently, proud rejoicing. The fact that the same cannot be said of Britain owes much to our increasingly cynical attitude.

How many of us can imagine a normal working day that might include, as my husband’s did not long ago, treating two horrifically burnt children who die despite your best, most sustained, efforts? Which ends with your having to tell their mother, who is incoherent with grief, that her children are dead? Where the purpose of showering, when you eventually get home, is to rid yourself of the lingering smell of burnt flesh? I happen to think that’s worth the £70,000 a year a new consultant earns.

But back to our unhappy lawyers. Of the one in four who wished they had other jobs, the majority wanted to be journalists or writers (only 2 per cent fancied working for the NHS). The most popular reason for not switching careers? “The possible drop in salary.” Not daft, these lawyers, are they? Meanwhile, journalism continues, against all the doomsayers’ odds, to be one of the most popular career choices for teenagers, while in politics Gordon Brown and David Cameron have just assembled teams of unprecedented youth.

And my 11-year-old daughter has been giving the matter of her future career some thought. She arrived home yesterday to tell us: “I still want to be a guitarist in a rock band, but only while I’m at secondary school. After that, I’ve decided to become a doctor.” I assumed that she’d come up with this plan solely to annoy her father (she succeeded, brilliantly), but it turned out she’d been inspired by watching Scrubs, the US TV medical sitcom.

Which all goes to prove the point: the more you obsess about your children, the more they will confound you. Which is just as it should be. Those of us lucky enough to have careers and families should be doubly grateful: first, that we have them at all; and secondly, that the next generation take such little notice of us

Source

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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"


For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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