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Posted on 02/28/2010 11:36:03 PM PST by rabscuttle385
The government-school establishment has said the same thing for decades: Education is too important to leave to the competitive market. If we really want to help our kids, we must focus more resources on the government schools.
But despite this mantra, the focus is on something other than the kids. When The Washington Post asked George Parker, head of the Washington, D.C., teachers union, about the voucher program there, he said: "Parents are voting with their feet. ... As kids continue leaving the system, we will lose teachers. Our very survival depends on having kids in D.C. schools so we'll have teachers to represent."
How revealing is that?
Since 1980, government spending on education, adjusted for inflation, has nearly doubled. But test scores have been flat for decades.
Today we spend a stunning $11,000 a year per student—more than $200,000 per classroom. It's not working. So when will we permit competition and choice, which works great with everything else? I'll explore those questions on my Fox Business program tonight night at 8 and 11 p.m. Eastern time (and again Friday at 10 p.m.).
The people who test students internationally told us that two factors predict a country's educational success: Do the schools have the autonomy to experiment, and do parents have a choice?
Parents care about their kids and want them to learn and succeed—even poor parents. Thousands line up hoping to get their kids into one of the few hundred lottery-assigned slots at Harlem Success Academy, a highly ranked charter school in New York City. Kids and parents cry when they lose.
Yet the establishment is against choice. The union demonstrated outside Harlem Success the first day of school. And President Obama killed Washington, D.C.'s voucher program.
This is typical of elitists, who believe that parents, especially poor ones, can't make good choices about their kids' education.
Is that so? Ask James Tooley about that. Tooley is a professor of education policy who spends most of every year in some of the poorest parts of Africa, India, and China. For 10 years, he's studied how poor kids do in "free" government schools and—hold on—private schools. That's right. In the worst slums, private for-profit schools educate kids better than the government's schools do.
Tooley finds as many as six private schools in small villages. "The majority of (poor) schoolchildren are in private school, and these schools outperform government schools at a fraction of the teacher cost," he says.
Why do parents with meager resources pass up "free" government schools and sacrifice to send their children to private schools? Because, as one parent told the BBC, the private owner will do something that's virtually impossible in America's government schools: replace teachers who do not teach.
As in America, the elitist establishment in those countries scoffs at the private schools and the parents who choose them. A woman who runs government schools in Nigeria calls such parents "ignoramuses."
But that can't be true. Tooley tested kids in both kinds of schools, and the private-school students score better.
To give the establishment its best shot, consider Head Start, which politicians view as sacred. The $166 billion program is 45 years old, so it's had time to prove itself. But guess what: The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recently found no difference in first-grade test results between kids who went through Head Start and similar kids who didn't. President Obama has repeatedly promised to "eliminate programs that don't work," but he wants to give Head Start a billion more dollars. The White House wouldn't explain this contradiction to me.
Andrew Coulson, head of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Reform, said, "If Head Start (worked), we would expect now, after 45 years of this program, for graduation rates to have gone up; we would expect the gap between the kids of high school dropouts and the kids of college graduates to have shrunk; we would expect students to be learning more. None of that is true."
Choice works, and government monopolies don't. How much more evidence do we need?
John Stossel is host of Stossel on the Fox Business Network. He's the author of Give Me a Break and of Myth, Lies, and Downright Stupidity. To find out more about John Stossel, visit his site at johnstossel.com.
bttt
Calling Captain Obvious
Kids have also been dumb for decades, too. I mean, look at the people that voted for the current occupant of the WH.
Wow, it's really mind-boggling that he actually SAID that to a reporter. Of course, all union leaders THINK this sort of stuff, but most of them seem to manage not say it out loud. But perhaps I shouldn't be surprised that the IQ of the head of the DC teachers union is down in the same cellar as the average IQ of DC public school teachers.
There are untold billions of dollars tied up in school buildings that arepredominately occupied by anchor babies from Mexico and Central America.
Meanwhile, the idiot Washington bureaucrat, Kay Bailey-Hutchison, is running for Governor of Texas vowing to fix (raise taxes and pour billions more into the education scheme) the high drop-out rate of said anchor babies who just want to get out of school and start their own lawn service.
In Texas, you don't own your home. You're simply renting it from the local school district. Don't believe me? Try not paying your school taxes for a couple of years.
Public employees should never have been allowed to unionize.
The only time unionization can work is if the employees’ demands can be held in check by the prospect of their employer going out of business. In business, bankruptcy is a very real possibility — unless some idiot government bails out the business — but with public employees their employer can’t go BK without taking down the government itself.
Is there any mechanism that would allow dismantling of these public employee unions short of the entire government going into default ? The only one I can think of is a hiring freeze and outsourcing any new demand for services, which in the case of schools is what charter schools and voucher programs do.
It is economically not cost-effective to fire public school teachers due to litigation costs. However, if you don’t replace any that retire, you could have just enough left after ten years to run the reform schools where all the delinquents are placed that get kicked out of the new charter and private schools. We should institute this immediately, to take advantage of the higher than normal retirement rate of the boomer generation. Transferring them to schools in the worst neighborhoods and having to teach the violent and stupid kids should provide added incentive for them to retire as early as possible.
How do you like my plan ?
The state should take those nice new properties away from the school districts, sell them to private operators, and issue vouchers to legal residents to attend.
Those that get kicked out of the new “private” schools (for violence, not making the grades, or because their parents object to the way the private school is run) as well as any kids who aren’t legal residents will still get their free education. They can attend the older, rundown, campuses where the unionized tenured public school teachers teach. If there aren’t enough older, rundown campuses, then new ones can be setup using those horrible “temporary” classroom trailers. Attending or teaching at a “public” school should be the least desirable option for all involved. That is the surest way to minimize the cost to the taxpayer.
In the district where I teach ( & Thank G*d, don’t live) Head Start has its main office- over many counties. It seems to employ all the prominent people of color in the district. Many of these women seem to dress up, lunch, & go on overnight trips ALL the time.
It exists as a glorified club of big paychecks & little actual work, except by the few people not in the cushy jobs. Head Start will never be allowed to fade away- it’s the country club job for minorities. Sorry. I said it. It’s true.
Our rural county of 20,000 people just built a $70 MILLION dollar high school. Talk about indentured servitude to the teachers.
It is never enough.
What audacity! I just **love** it! LOL
$11,000???? Huh? That's only the operating costs. The true cost is double that!
Government schools have accounting practices that would make an Enron accountant blush!
In my state retired teachers are NOT considered a school expense. They are counted a state retired workers. Also, in my county new schools are bond issues and not school budget expenses. Also not included are the other county and state services that schools use. For instance lawn service, police surveillance of the halls or traffic control before school or during school events. The schools have access to county legal and accounting services as well. These are just some of the hidden costs never reported in school budgets.
As far as I'm concerned, she is pandering to the predominately demoRat teacher base and asking them to cross over in the primaries and vote for her. And when she gets in office, she will repay them with my hard earned money. Untold trillions of dollars have been sucked out of our economy to give half-educated demoRats a place to work while waiting for the next election.
I would rather vote for Lucifer himself than anyone saying they are going to fix the school problems.
It doesn't need to be fixed. It needs to be abolished.
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My feelings exactly!
The government schools must be abolished! That is the only solution. Yet,...It amazed me the number of so-called conservatives that claim their child's government school is “different”.
Your school district ain't got nothing on Washington, DC.
I remember reading a couple of years ago that the operating cost per student in DC was only $8500 per year.
Wow. Quite a shock. I thought it was much, much higher.
And then I looked at the budget. The $8500 comprises strictly the salaries of teachers in the classroom. Not included in that figure included administrative staff, maintenance staff, associated faculty, central office staff, maintenance costs, electricity, gas, water, educational materials (you know - books & things), supplies, not even toilet paper!
The ACTUAL operating cost per student at the time was over $20,000 per year!
LOL!
sitetest
Personally, I think the best transitional approach is to go to a 100% voucher system — meaning 100% of the total per student cost of public schools — and make it freely useable for private schools, home schools (with payment made AFTER the student passes a standardized test showing reasonable improvement OR being at “grade level”), and public schools. Then the public school teachers will have an equal opportunity to compete for students and jobs. Most of the competent ones would quickly find employment in private schools (many of which would open in buildings purchased from the public school system). The incompetent ones can stay in the public school system and teach the delinquents whose parents don’t really care where or even *if* they go to school — those parents aren’t a powerful political force, and so aren’t likely to sustain a union with much clout.
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