“The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of ‘liberalism’ they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.”

Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas


Thursday, January 27, 2011

The sad state of American education

This in a nutshell is what's wrong with the American school system. Teachers' unions have a strangle hold on education policy and fight tooth and nail to prevent parents from having any choice in which schools their children will be educated. If there's anything teachers detest, it's the possibility of competition from better schools that will expose their own failures as educators. One desperate mom in Ohio learned that the hard way.....



Thanks to decades of teacher-union bribery, democrats' slavish devotion to the union, and more recently Obama's policy on school choice, kids are stuck in whatever dreadful school the government forces them to be. If they attached the education dollars to the kids, then let the parents send their kid to whatever school they wanted, the schools would have to compete for that money...everybody wins except bad schools and bad teachers. You may have guessed that the teachers' union is having none of that.

Somebody will argue that the parents can always move, but families shouldn't have to move to find decent schools for their kids.

Neal Boortz maintains that the single greatest threat to our republic is the teachers' unions and I tend to agree with him.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Actually, the problems with the American education system are systemic and by design.

http://deliberatedumbingdown.com/

Ed said...

True Glen, but many of them would self-correct if competition were introduced among schools for education dollars.

Anonymous said...

@Ed "...many of them would self-correct...."

Many of them would self correct if the we had separation of school and state.

http://www.schoolandstate.org/home.htm

Ed said...

That's precisely what I'm talking about. All school operations should be managed at the local level. The federal education dollars should be attached to each kid, K-12. It would end up being like $8,200 each. If all schools competed for those dollars, only the good schools would survive and the difference between public and private schools would essentially be erased. The parents pay those taxes, why shouldn't the parents be allowed to direct that money to the school of their choice? Short answer: because it takes the national education bureaucracy completely out of the equation and the teachers' unions become superfluous and impotent. Besides the Fairtax, education vouchers is the single best change I can think of for the US.

Anonymous said...

@Ed "...The federal education dollars should be...."

With federal money comes federal strings. Get the federal government out of education entirely. In fact, get ALL government, federal AND local, out of education.

Anonymous said...

The great George Carlin on education in America:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acLW1vFO-2Q