Responsibility for Education

Responsibility for Education

by Mark Luedtke

Throw more money at the problem. That's always the first, and usually only, solution proposed for every social problem in this country anymore. It's a social sickness that we no longer think critically of how to solve our problems, we no longer try to solve our problems ourselves, we just throw more money to the government to solve our problems for us. Inevitably the problems get worse. Fortunately, Dayton citizens refused to follow that route to solve the problems of Dayton Public Schools.

Unfortunately 5 of 9 districts in Montgomery County passed school funding levies. That money won't fix troubled schools because the solution to failing schools can't be had locally anymore. Schools aren't just failing in Montgomery County; they're failing all over the country. The problems are big government, teachers unions, and the social problem of failure to take responsibility for ourselves that is reflected in our failing schools.

Primary education is an inherently local problem. The best way to educate children changes from neighborhood to neighborhood in the same city, let alone from Dayton to Los Angeles to the mountains of Montana. The iconic neighborhood school is one of the fundamental institutions that helped make America the greatest nation in the world, but we chose to forgo that institution and replace it with the federal Department of Education. What lesson do we teach our kids when we abdicate our responsibility for their education?

Would you want George Bush to teach your kids English? Or anything else? How about Ted Kennedy? I hope not. But for some reason we choose to outsource our responsibility for our neighborhood schools to Washington D.C. and thereby make George Bush the Teacher in Chief and put Ted Kennedy on the federal school board.

It's seductive to think that we could just create a Department of Education in Washington, and it would guarantee that our kids would get a good education. In fact, the opposite is true - the Department of Education has done more damage to our kids' education and futures than anything else. That was inevitable. It's not possible that some unaccountable bureaucrats in Washington could do a better job determining how to educate our kids than we can do locally.

Welfare of all types is damaging to both recipient and provider, and the Department of Education administers a form of welfare using money for the purpose of education. The government seemingly provides the money (and all the destructive mandates and conditions that come with it) for the education of our children, so we don't have to take responsibility for doing it ourselves. Educational welfare is so seductive that we refuse to acknowledge the elephant in the room – the more money we pump into the Department of Education, the worse our kids are educated.

Teachers unions are another impediment to quality education. I'm sure teachers unions began with the best of intentions, but like any organization, over time the primary motivation of teachers unions evolved into survival. The original motives of teachers unions are now secondary. One harmful motive of teachers unions is to protect teachers from a competitive environment - an environment that rewards excellent performance and rejects poor performance – an environment that would improve the quality of education.

Between the big government Department of Education and the teachers unions, our education system is more like a Soviet institution than an American one. After the fall of the Soviet Union, we proclaimed that the concept of central planning was dead. Free market competition had proven to be vastly superior. Even China's communists scrapped central planning for a free market. Unfortunately, the old Soviet ideas of central planning and lack of competition are alive, well, and hurting our kids in modern America.

Conservatives have a plan for our education problem. They want to take your money, send it through the IRS where a portion is siphoned off for the reasonable costs of IRS operation, the hidden and useless costs of IRS operation, and the waste and corruption in every government bureaucracy. Then they'll take what's left of your money, send it to the Department of Education where another portion is siphoned off for the same reasons. Then they'll send what's left of your money back to you in the form of vouchers so you can pay to send your child to the school of your choice.

Conservatives call that small government. The only worse idea I can think of is to do the exact same thing with more of your money, except sending the final, reduced portion of your money directly to government schools instead of you. That's the liberals' plan.

I have a better idea. Let's take back our freedom and responsibility for the education of our kids from the big government of both parties. By doing so, we can teach our kids about responsibility, freedom, the dangers of welfare and big government, and the value of hard work to achieve success. Let's abolish the Department of Education. Let's keep our own money to use locally for our children's education as we see fit. Let's allow federalism to work (do they even teach federalism in government schools?) - 50 laboratories to find local solutions by applying free-market forces to provide the highest quality education at the lowest price.