Sowell Educates

The Houston Courant ^ | 6/30/2021 | B. Vasoli

[The Houston Courant]

Over the last, terrible schoolyear, appreciators of educational freedom and excellence can at least take heart that their cause is winning the esteem of many parents. This owes not only to the poor behavior of American educrats and their unionized minions, but also to the spiritedness of school choice advocates—noteworthy among them, the masterly economist Thomas Sowell.

When Sowell turned 90 a year ago, he concurrently published Charter Schools and Their Enemies, a superb book among a superb oeuvre. Lovers of free enterprise and public virtue should immerse themselves in the latter, and in Jason L. Riley’s splendid new Sowell biography Maverick. (I digress to especially recommend Sowell’s Wealth, Poverty, and Politics, a work of intermingled social science, environmental science, and history that will jolt any sentient person into deep rumination.) But Sowell’s championship of school choice and of educational rigor deserve particular heed now.

Sowell’s case for charter schools devastates the far-left conceit that district schools can generally achieve the same or better outcomes for students. In Charter Schools and Their Enemies, the author compares children’s performances in these two different settings, paying particular attention to charter schools with: 1) ethnic compositions similar to the district schools operating in their locales and 2) the same geographical settings (literally, the same school buildings) as the local district schools. On the latter point, Sowell takes particular care to examine schools that teach at least one class at the same grade level at the same location. (Such schools sound unusual to most people but actually exist abundantly in New York City.)

Having thus controlled for differences in background and surroundings...

[dsrtsage]

National treasure. I know demonrats who call him stupid and other assorted names that conservatives would be buried under the prison for using. I despise demonrats

[CharlesOConnell]

Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, whose father and grandfather were Skull and Bones men, published "Deliberate Dumbing Down of America". She says that if your public, private, charter or home schools accepts federal money and submits to federal, standardized testing, you are just as much in the system as if your kids were mainstream dumbed down. This hobbling by the system, from the NEA down to your teacher's local union, applies just as much if you are homeschooling, because your child is undergoing standardized testing.

John Jake Klyczek, a professor in the English department at Joliet Junior College, has written "School World Order: The Technocratic Globalization of Corporatized Education". He notes that gigantic corporations are reaching into charter-schools with public-private partnerships, where your child is assigned a rating early in K-12, with a federal i.d. number you can't know, your child is assigned a job and even a company in a very extensive data mining/sharing consortium, your child's education is deliberately dumbed down, on a model that came to the U.S. from the north German state of Prussia about 1875 when compulsory universal schooling was established, and your family will be excluded from decisioning about your child, who will only receive a bare minimum of training to be able to perform the child's already assigned life task, in what is called Life Long Learning.

[CharlesOConnell]

John Taylor Gatto noted the NEA and local school union dodge in cooperation with the federal department of education, that charter schools operate in disused school buildings, after the first initiative with motivated principals and teachers fizzles out, the charter schools are taken over by the local school districts, dying on the vine.