The news that the District's representative in Congress has joined with organized labor and liberals within the Democratic Party to demand an end to Washington's successful voucher experiment shouldn't come as much of a shock.
Voucher programs and public charter schools are under attack all over the country by the very people who like to justify more federal programs than I can possibly list here as needed "for the children." The problem is that in the liberal ideological and political world, the interests of the "children" almost always take a back seat to their belief that every interest must be serviced through government and unionized government workers or not at all.
The liberal mindset sees this insistence on denying children, and particularly minority children, access to any institutions other than traditional public schools as evidence of some ethereal goodness and insists that anyone who seeks to change the educational status quo is an enemy of education itself. It seems not to matter a whit to most of these people that many of the schools they would force children to attend don't work.
The answer, they tell us, is not competition or innovation, but money. It is their belief that if government at all levels will simply dump enough money into the existing system, all will be well, though the evidence suggests otherwise. With one of the most expensive per-student expenditures in the country, the problem in the District of Columbia certainly isn't money, but an educational, administrative and municipal bureaucracy that is bloated and largely incompetent. The best teachers are ground down and forced to become little more than babysitters or to seek more rewarding employment elsewhere as quickly as possible.
That schools in the District and many other areas of the country are broken is no secret, yet most everyone within the existing system continues to spend more energy blaming others for the problem than trying to fix it. When they aren't blaming the tax system, the taxpayer or Congress, in fact, they tend to blame parents for sending them children who are unruly or ill-prepared. The one thing they know is that it isn't their fault. The result is that we are turning out class after class of young adults who are finding it harder and harder to compete in a global economy against workers from nations that actually take education seriously.
The rise of the charter and voucher movements, along with the skyrocketing number of parents choosing to home-school their children rather than entrust them to a system that doesn't work, represent a rational response to the problem. Union representatives and elected officials like Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) claim that rather than giving up on traditional public schools, these parents should stick with them and help fix them.
What she is really asking, of course, is for parents to accept the fact of an ugly and unacceptable status quo. The District's schools have been a disaster for decades and have helped keep the children of District residents from achieving their dreams or the success every parent wishes for his or her children. What Ms. Norton and her cohorts are telling those who have found a better way is that the greater good dictates that they sacrifice the hopes and dreams of their children to the ideological and political demands of those who have failed and continue to fail.
That's the ugly truth in Washington and elsewhere. Charter schools and private schools are under attack around the country today, not because they don't work, but because they do. The fact that the victims of these attacks are often those poor and minority kids who most need a good education seems of little concern to folks like Ms. Norton.
Charter schools and vouchers were originally seen by many as a means not only of providing a way out for children trapped in failing schools that weren't being fixed, but as a way to inject competitive pressure into a monopolistic structure and thus force the traditional public school systems to change and improve. Unfortunately, however, the existing system is responding to competition like most monopolies — by trying to close down its competitors rather than improve what it has to offer.
Barack Obama, like John McCain, claims to be interested in educational innovation and in actually finding solutions to the educational mess in which the country finds itself.
Perhaps he ought to give Ms. Norton a call and tell her it's about the children, not the bureaucrats.
I've always been in favor of school vouchers for the precise reasons Keene mentions. Many of our public schools are broken, and the entrenched bureaucracy (driven and controlled by the NEA) refuses to acknowledge the real cause of the crisis. And, obviously, if they don't acknowledge reality, there's no way they're going to fix it. The real price is being paid by our nation's children, and the future leadership of America on the global stage is becoming more and more in jeopardy with each class of graduating incompetents.
Is there a single one of us who doesn't want the best educational opportunities for our kids? I can't imagine there is. So why are we not pushing back against the NEA, demanding a voucher system that would allow our kids access to the best schools in our area?
It's simple to understand, really. Have you ever looked at your property tax bill? I'm sure there are variations depending on where in the country you live, but most of my property taxes (about 90%, if I recall correctly) are allocated to my local school district. Even those who don't have children in school pay large sums of money each year to fund our public school system, and that's fine because we all ultimately benefit from a well-educated nation. The problem, though, is that some people are forced to send their kids to a public school that underperforms. Wouldn't it be great to allow parents in that situation -- many of whom are poor minorities, remember -- to use their tax dollars to send their kids to a local private school that far exceeds the national average test scores? Yes, of course it would!
And that's precisely what vouchers would do. It blows my mind that the people still don't get this concept. And yet, time after time, we see those who would most benefit from vouchers -- those poor minorities -- get poked and prodded by the NEA to stand up against it because it would somehow threaten them. It's typical, backward liberal thinking.
On another note, I think one of the main problems with public education is the fact that we're collectively afraid to hold teachers accountable for their ability to get results from kids. Yes, teaching is a noble and usually thankless profession, but why is it that one of the most important jobs in our society has zero accountability? There is absolutely no reason our teachers shouldn't be paid and/or penalized based on their performance. The rest of us have to deal with that reality in our jobs every day, so why can't teachers handle it? Some would undoubtedly wash out, yes, but not everyone is capable of performing every job at a high level. Personally, I couldn't handle teaching; I do not possess many of the skills needed to be an excellent teacher, and I wouldn't want to do it even if I did. That's why I'm not a teacher. On the other hand, many teachers couldn't handle (or wouldn't want) my job. Welcome to the real world. Similarly, some schools would be forced to radically alter their philosophy or face being closed down. Again, welcome to the real world where competition allows no slouches. Anyway, those schools and teachers who remained would thrive, and competition for better jobs and pay would draw more effective people into the teaching profession and provide a better overall education for our kids. Who loses in this scenario? No one, except the NEA, which would lose its stranglehold on our nation's educational system. I would wager that most teachers would love the chance to get out from under the thumb of the NEA and be rewarded appropriately for their success.
We need vouchers, now more than ever. They represent the capitalist version of education: rewarding excellence, innovation, and effectiveness. The socialist version of education is the NEA: a monolithic, incompetent, bloated bureaucracy that underperforms despite burning through copious amounts of taxpayer money.
Which do you think would better serve our children, and our nation?
There's my two cents.
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