as much as i complained about it at the time, like all school kids do, i now believe i went through the pinnacle of public schooling... 1960-1973. it had already started to fall in 1970.
Posted on 09/04/2006 3:36:41 PM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
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.
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, "Competition 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 home-school their kids. Two percent of school-aged kids are home-schooled now. If parents weren't taxed to pay for lousy government schools, more might teach their kids at home.
Some parents choose to home-school for religious reasons, but home-schooling has been increasing by 10 percent a year because so many parents are just fed up with the government's schools.
Home-schooled 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. Home-schooled kids also score almost 10 percent higher than the average American high school student on the ACT.
I don't know how these home-schooling 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.
Home schooling is on the rise, which is good to see. Nothing gets changed without a few people taking the first steps.
I'm am SO glad I'm done with schooling my kid. My son is going to a Tech College right now to learn some valuable, marketable skills. We told him early and ofter that we would NOT be paying for a state university brainwashing. If he wanted help with school, there had to be a good job prospect at the end of the line.
Eventhough he was in public school, I spent as much time with him in school as possible, did the Field Trips every few weeks, and de-programmed him EVERY night over dinner. I was The Evil StepMother, but I think he turned out alright, though school was a struggle for him from 8th grade on, but that's not unusual with boys in our public school system. They're bored, and the teaching methods they use are archaic!
When it was just him and me, one on one, he could absorb any concept...and I even got that non-reader to read by giving him books that held his attention and made him THINK a little bit. I allowed him to read all sorts of "adult-ish" books in High School, as did I back then.
Each one, teach one. ;)
It's not about you. It's about kids.
The best school in the world is indoctrination, not education. Kids learn from their parents.
More welfare isn't the answer.
Parents need to pay for their children's education.
as much as i complained about it at the time, like all school kids do, i now believe i went through the pinnacle of public schooling... 1960-1973. it had already started to fall in 1970.
Teachers unions get 99.99% of their money from teachers' salaries.
99.99% of teachers' salaries come from property taxes which everyone with property pays whether you have kids in school or not.
I agree teachers unions are evil. But how does home schooling take money away from the unions?
I know that.......which is why homeschooling is not for me or my child. It is not for everyone.
It is my responsibility as a parent to see to her education, I accept that responsibility. I also know and accept my own limitations and do what we can to give her the best education we can.
The best school in the world is indoctrination, not education
I have no clue what you are talking about.
Kids learn from their parents.
No kidding.......
Right. That's what conservatives used to look like before big business and slackers in Congress took them over. He's a stand up guy. Hard to argue with him. Public schools suck.
>John Stossel isn't a conservative. He's a libertarian.<
Whatever John Stossel is, I was glad to see his broadcast on the school situation in America today the other evening.
I'm afraid most parents who keep their kids in government schools consider them "free". Well, they are certainly not free! And the movement to dumb down public schools, thus, your children and mine, began well over a half century ago, and it has gained momentum each year since. The children are the future. What they are being "taught", and what they are NOT being taught, has everything to do with what kind of adults they will become, how they will govern. I believe the only answer to upgrading the public schools is COMPETITION. If a school does not measure up to higher standards, parents should be allowed to send their children to a school that does. Competition is healthy and will bring results. More money will certainly NOT bring results. Unfortunately, the longer the government schools get away with their indoctrination programs, the fewer people remain who remember the "good old days" of eight room school houses, the paddle in the principal's office, the allegiance to the flag, Christmas carols being sung in holiday programs. In other words, when one doesn't know any different, one accepts "the norm of the day" namby pamby as it may be. It is time to put God back into the schools, and faith into those who govern this country, a clear choice of whom is allowed to teach our precious children, or God help us all!
The public schools were a reaction to Irish Catholic immigration in the 1830s,40s, and 50s. Initially, they were explicitly intended as means of coercively "Protestantizing" Catholic children. That is how the Unitarians sold the system to a country that was already the most literate on earth.
The Unitarians' own motivation was to use the system to make Unitarianism the defacto established religion of the US. This would be accomplished largely through their control of the "teachers' seminaries" (later called normal schools, and today "schools of education"). If they could control the training of the teachers and the teachers' worldview, the Unitarians knew that local control over other things didn't matter all that much.
The Catholics resisted the encroachments of the "common school system" (what today's government schools were called then), which is why a Catholic school system developed.
As noted, the "public schools" were created out of, and spread initially largely because of, anti-Catholic sentiment, which historically made them a darling of both the liberals and the Ku Klux Klan (if you wanted to the join the Klan in the 20th century you had to, among other things, pledge support for "free" public schools and the "sacred" principle of separation of church and state). Later in the 20th century the government schools passed completely into the hands of the secular/progressive left and most recently they have been captured by hardcore cultural Marxists.
The government schools can't be reformed any more than the Soviet collective agricultural system could have been reformed. The model is the mistake.
Today the government's schools are destroying our children, families, and culture. The entire system needs to die. Tomorrow wouldn't be too soon. Perhaps the most patriotic act a parent can take today is to refuse to offer up his children as a living sacrifice to the Moloch of government schools.
Then you're to be commended.
I'm a huge proponent of home schooling, but you know what's best for your family. Which, by the way, is one of the basic principles home schooling is built on.
Virginia allows that. An additional 3rd grade class had to be added at my daughter's school because another school in the district did not meet state standards and parents are moving kids to the schools that do.
'64 through '70 in inner-city Milwaukee Publik Skrewel. '70-'77 in a suburban area of Wisconsin that was pretty well funded and not drowning in socialism...yet.
But I had all the credits I needed to graduate by the time I was 16! Mom made me stick out half of my Senior Year "for the memories." Bor-ing, LOL!
Joined the Army at 17 and never looked back. Learned more in my first few years in the military than in all the other years of schooling combined. And then Uncle Sam paid for my (practical: accounting & business) college courses, too! :)
The NEA could not possibly allow that to happen as too many entrenched unqualified teachers would lose their jobs.
>>>>"I agree teachers unions are evil. But how does home schooling take money away from the unions?"<<<<
Each school is paid by "head count"
How many students per period day, they count every student every day and submit a Bill.
If your kid ain't there they don't get the MONEY!
Fewer kids Less Money.
No reason to raise your property Tax if...
TT
Thank you.
I've been beaten up pretty badly in the past on these types of threads because I admit that homeschooling is just not right for us.
The capitation payment is also why those who control the schools (not the classroom teacher or local principal) love illegals. They lose American children and keep their numbers and cash flow up with illegals.
School selection is not available in most states. How wonderful it is in yours, because it will be shown that freedom to choose works!
It is also available in Delaware, but we chose to leave there and move to Virginia because the schools are far superior here than those we could get to in Delaware.
And that is a pretty sad commentary on public schools in Delaware because we live in the 5th poorest county (thus school district) in Virginia.
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