Time to End Goverment's Monopoly on Education

Time to End Goverment's Monopoly on Education
by Mark Luedtke

Grab the torches and pitchforks.  It's time to storm the palace.  Maybe you heard that 17 of the nation's 50 largest school districts fail to graduate half of their students.  And the best of these fifty graduates only 77%.  In a competitive world, America cannot survive with those graduation rates.

Or maybe you haven't heard.  I pour over headlines and what I consider important stories every day, and I can't think of a more important story than the damage government is doing to our children's future, and therefore our nation's future.  Forget Iraq.  Forget China.  Forget the terrorists.  This and America's looming debt crisis are the 2 most important stories in America. But I discovered this story in a Wall Street Journal editorial, not on the front page of every newspaper where it belongs. 

The liberal mainstream media and the conservative media both bury the major crises facing America caused by both parties while exaggerating the minor differences between the 2 parties to divide the nation and keep the 2 parties in power.  This accomplice press forms the third leg of government, propping up Republicans and Democrats. The accomplice press buried what is arguably the most important story since the fall of the Berlin wall, because both Republicans and Democrats are to blame.

This isn't some somebody else's problem either.  According to the study done by Colin Powell's America's Promise Alliance (APA), Cleveland is the third worst of the 50 at 34.1% graduation rate, and Columbus is 5th worst at 40.9%.  At least Ohio is in bad company.  Detroit is worst at 24.9%, Indianapolis second worst at 30.5%, and Baltimore 4th worst at 34.6%.  New York, Los Angeles and Miami are all in the bottom 17.  To call this a national crisis is more than an understatement. 

So where's the news coverage? The Dayton Daily News website carried a 3/31 essay by Dayton Daily News education reporter, Scott Elliot, about changing the calculation to determine graduation rates, but it never mentioned the failure rates or the study.  Mr. Elliot's article referenced a 3/30 article from the Columbus Dispatch by Jennifer Smith Richards, also about calculations, which dedicates 2 sentences of its 905 words to the study and Columbus' numbers.

Instead of raising the alarm about our failed schools, these 2 essays focused on calculating graduation rates.  The APA study calculates what percentage of freshmen graduate on time.  Simple.  But government schools don't use that analysis.  While government schools have been failing half of our students, they've spent their resources fudging the graduation rates to make them look better instead of solving the problem.  And the accomplice press spends it's effort making excuses over calculations instead of raising the alarm and calling for the people to take up torches and pitchforks.

And government is not just fudging graduation rates.  Washington D.C. schools, ranked 23rd worst at 58.2% graduation rate, also fudges the numbers on how much money it spends per student.  Columnist Andrew Coulson reported in the 4/6 Washington Post that Washington actually spends $25,000 per student per year, comparable to tuition at Chelsea Clinton's chic private D.C. school, but D.C. reports it only spends $8,322 per student.  Most private schools, which have high graduation rates, cost only $5,000 per student per year. Rome is burning while our naked emperors fiddle, the press disguises the story with calculator games, and the people entertain themselves with bread and circuses.

These problems are the predictable result of government's monopoly on education.  We wouldn't give Ma Bell this much power over our telephones.  We wouldn't give Microsoft this much power over our computers.  The government school monopoly has failed, and the great experiment in freedom created by the Founding Fathers is going to fail with it.  Protecting its monopoly, California recently ruled that homeschoolers must have government certified teaching certificates, effectively outlawing homeschooling. 

Why would we give government, the most wasteful, politically motivated, ineffective institution ever created except for the UN, that kind of power over our children, their future, and therefore the future of our country? It's not because it's legal.  The Constitution grants no power to the federal government to educate students.  It's neither efficient or logical.  We send our hard earned money to bureaucrats in Dayton, Columbus, and Ohio, they waste it, then send a smaller portion back to us with cookie-cutter mandates.  It's not possible that some bureaucrat in Washington knows more about educating children in our neighborhood as well as the hundreds of thousands of other neighborhoods in the country than the people in that neighborhood.  Same with the bureaucrats in state capitals and downtown.

Parents and students also share the blame.  Government education is a form of welfare, and like all welfare programs, it's destructive to both provider and recipient.  Education is an inherently family issue.  When government subsumes the responsibility for educating students, parents respond by surrendering that responsibility.  But nobody can educate a student.  You can lead a student to school, but you can't make him learn.  Only family can instill the responsibility to get an education in a child, and if that happens, the child will learn no matter the school or environment.  Government gains the power it craves from education welfare, and parents think of government provided education as an entitlement.  Welfare in the form of "free" education undermines the family's responsibility to educate children.  Education welfare is training our children to become life-long welfare dependents.

Teacher's unions are also complicit in the failure of our schools.  I have nothing against unions; workers are free to band together to take advantage of economies of scale the same as businesses.  But teacher's unions protect bad teachers.  Lack of merit pay hurts good teachers.  The end result is teachers unions promote bad teachers at the expense of good teachers.

Neither our children nor our nation will succeed if we allow this to continue. Even a government school graduate like me can see the solution to our failed government schools: competition.  Free market competition is what made this country the greatest country the world has ever seen, and competition will transform our schools into the best in the world.  Parents should march on their education bureaucracies and demand school choice.  Americans can have neighborhood schoolhouses on every street corner, competing to provide the highest quality education at the lowest price.  Accountable to parents instead of bureaucrats, schools will succeed.  The only way we can fail is if government forces us to fail, like it is now.

But Gov. Strickland is in the pocket of the teacher's unions.  Strickland wants to create a new bureaucracy in Columbus to burden schools.  As if a bureaucracy ever made anything more effective.  Strickland is proud that he's taken more power and responsibility from parents and neighborhoods and transfered it to bureaucrats by increasing state funding for schools from 48% to 54%.  The governor is against private schools even though they're cheaper and more successful.  Money is not the problem.  To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, government is not the solution to failed schools, government is the problem.  Free people are the solution.