When a School District is a Prison Sentence

Veronique de Rugy makes an excellent case for privatizing education by comparing private sector manufacturing (where productivity has increased) with public education (where productivity is decreasing):

Since 1975, manufacturing output has more than doubled, while employment in the sector has decreased by 31 percent. […] These statistics reveal that the average American manufacturer is three times more productive today than in 1975 — a sure sign of economic progress.

That’s exactly the opposite of what the government does. With government, you get, at best, the same service at a higher cost over time.

Take K–12 education, for instance. For years, we have been throwing money at poorly performing schools, yet it has not moved the needle on performance. Over the last 40 years, the federal government has spent $1.8 trillion on education, and spending per pupil in the U.S. has tripled in real terms.

Despite the dramatic increase in spending, there has been no notable change in student outcomes. (National Review)

The message is not that government is inherently bad; it’s not. The problem is that government failures are rewarded with more money so they can continue to fail in bigger and more spectacular fashion; private sector failures dry up and blow away, freeing up capital and people for potentially successful projects. The same needs to happen in education.

Instead, we get stuff like this that really pisses me off…

An Ohio mother's attempt to provide her daughters with a better education has landed her behind bars.

Kelley Williams-Bolar was convicted of lying about her residency to get her daughters into a better school district.

"It's overwhelming. I'm exhausted," she said. "I did this for them, so there it is. I did this for them." (ABC News)

She should get a medal for exposing an unjust law!
A mother lies about her residency in order to get her kids out of a failed school and into a better district and now she’s going to jail. This is an outrage. Will her kids really be better off with their mother in jail?

School districts are in place not for students, but to protect real estate values, ghettoizing the poor in low-property tax areas that doom the underfunded schools to failure.

District boundaries should be erased and all schools should receive more equitable funding. I know I sound like a liberal on this, but if we’re going to publicly fund education, it is illegal and immoral to give the poor and minorities the crappy end of the stick.

The free-market answer is to privatize it all
Let entrepreneurial teachers form small business teaching companies and shop their services. Collapse the department of education and return the money to the states. This will result in the good teachers rising to the top and getting paid more. The bad ones will be looking for another line of work.

Every parent can go shopping, voucher in hand. The bad schools will lose business, forcing the teaching company that runs it to lose its contract, making way for a new cadre of teachers to try their hand.

True, the rich will take their voucher and put their own money on top of it and go shopping for elite private schools, and some teaching companies will specialize in that, but there is no way in a free enterprise system that such activity will consume the entire market. Someone will have to go teach the poor kids for the basic price of the voucher, and there are plenty of great teachers who do that right now. Going free market won’t change that. Teachers teach because they love it, and many enjoy the challenge of teaching “the unteachable.”

If we want to improve education in this country, we need to free teachers from their bureaucratic shackles and stop jailing parents for violating illegitimate rules and boundaries.

Here’s to you Ms. Williams-Bolar. You are a hero in my book, as are those teachers who tirelessly toil in our nation’s worst school systems

Education: Too Important to be Left to Government

Our education system is not suffering a lack of money, it is suffering a lack of competition.

Our education system is a colossal failure, still being run on an outdated, century-old model.  It is a Progressive Ozymandias:

...Nought but the teachers unions remaining to disclose
The site of these forgotten students ... (Apologies to Shelley)

Government Rewards Failure, The Private Sector Punishes It

Walter E. Williams asks a simple question, then answers it brilliantly:

Why is Wal-Mart so successful? Millions of people voluntarily enter their stores and part with their money in exchange for Wal-Mart's products and services. In order for that to happen, Wal-Mart and millions of other profit-motivated businesses must please people.

He then contrasts private sector success to endemic public sector failure.

A major non-profit service provider is the public education establishment that delivers primary and secondary education at nearly a trillion-dollar annual cost. Public education is a major source of complaints about poor services that in many cases constitute nothing less than gross fraud.

If Wal-Mart, or any of the millions of producers who are in it for money and profits, were to deliver the same low-quality services, they would be out of business, but not public schools.

Schools don't need more money

John Stossel writes about how an "underfunded," "minority" charter school is outperforming all public schools in Oakland.

Consider the American Indian Public Charter School in Oakland, Calif. It was once a failing school, but now it's one of the best in California. Ben Chavis turned it around without any additional money.

Chavis' experience exposes the school establishment's lies for what they are. Nearly all of Chavis' students are considered economically disadvantaged (98 percent qualify for free lunches), yet they have the fourth-highest test scores of any school in the state.

"In Oakland this year, on the AP (advanced placement) exam, we had 100 percent of all the blacks and Mexicans in the city of Oakland who passed AP calculus," Chavis said. "There are four high schools, and we're the only ones who had anyone pass AP calc."

Yet Chavis accomplishes this without the "certified" teachers so revered by the educational establishment. His classes are as big as, and sometimes bigger than, public school classes, but only a quarter of his teachers are certified by the state. (John Stossel - Money is Not What Schools Need)

I highly recommend you read all about The Indian School here:  LA Times - Indian School.  It will open your eyes and give you ammo for arguing against the statists who insist we need to give those who have wrecked the system more money and more power.

I like David Warren's solution to all this:

The one immediate, radical reform for which I think we should aim, after winning the battle of ideas, is the destruction of all centralized school boards and liquidation of all departments of education. Put every single public and high school in the control of a local parent association, and necessity -- the most efficient instructor -- will soon teach the parents what they must do. (David Warren - Back to Schools)

Indeed. For the sake of this nation, get the federal government out of primary and secondary education.  Only competition and innovation will restore what progressive statism has destroyed.

Government-owned nonprofit entities are immune to the ruthless market discipline of being forced to please customers. The same can be said of businesses that receive government subsidies. (Walter E. Williams)

Expose the education system to the brutal forces of the marketplace
It will empower parents, shut out the parasitic bureaucrats, bring costs down and student knowledge up.  Best of all, the crappy teachers will be looking for a job in another line of work, because no competitive school will want them.

Federal Failure

It's The Education, Stupid!

Evan Thomas, in an otherwise useless Newsweek article, observes:

Grade inflation is so out of control in the nation's high schools that 43 percent of college-bound seniors taking the SATs have A averages—even though SAT scores have remained flat or drifted slowly downward for years.

The Federal Government Killed our Education System

Decline in public education can be traced back to the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, a 60's version of No Child Left Behind. Indeed a straight line to hell can be drawn from that date, through the 1979 establishment of the Education Department, to where we are now.

The deeper the federal government and the teachers unions get into education, the dumber our students become and the more it costs us. This should provide a lesson for those who want more government involvement in healthcare.

Over 200 years ago, the nation's Founders understood that federal intervention into state, local, and family concerns like education would be futile. They knew that the federal government would be too distant and unwieldy to solve problems in the nation's diverse cities, towns, and hamlets.

It's a major reason why the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution declares that "the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people," and why the Constitution makes no mention of education at all. (CATO - Neal McCluskey)

Diversity Killed the Health Care Bill

Why is the health care bill so contentious, with seemingly irreconcilable demands? Because we are a diverse collection of people. We were never meant to have a national politburo imposing one-size-fits-all, we-say-so regulations on us.

Each state should hammer out its own solutions based on the particular needs of its residents. I don't want a Vermont solution here in Colorado, and I'm sure Oregon doesn't want Texas telling it what to do.
It's time to let 50 experiments bloom, as the founders intended.