Posted on 09/29/2010 10:28:26 AM PDT by Kaslin
President Barack Obama said on NBC on Monday he would like American children to spend more time in public schools. Here is a better idea: American children should spend no time in public schools.
County by county, state by state, Americans should begin functionally abolishing government-run schools and replacing them with a free market in schools. On the federal level, Congress should kill the Department of Education by choking off its funding. The department was not constitutional in the first place.
Everybody's children should get the same chance Obama's children have had to attend the private school of their parents' choice.
American children should have the opportunity not only to attend schools where they are well instructed in reading, writing and arithmetic, but also where they are unambiguously taught that our Declaration of Independence is right -- that God is the Author of our rights and that even the government must obey His laws.
We should aim for a society where children spend more time with their most important teachers, their parents, and less time with the less important teachers at their school.
Obama wants the opposite. And he does not want our children spending more time with just any teachers, but with government teachers -- who often double as liberal propagandists seeking to indoctrinate children with values contrary to those they learn at home, while failing to teach them reading, writing and arithmetic.
"I think we should have a longer school year," Obama said on NBC. "We now have our kids go to school about a month less than most other advanced countries. And that makes a difference. It means that kids are losing a lot of what they learn during the summer."
Obama then made a class-war argument to defend his point -- in the process taking a snotty swipe at what he presumes to be the inferior reading habits of lower-income families.
"It's especially severe for poorer kids who may not be seeing as many books in their house during the summers, aren't getting supplemental educational activities," Obama said. "So, the idea of a longer school year, I think, makes sense."
In keeping with his Marxist analysis, Obama pointed to the education system in the People's Republic of China -- a nation governed by the Communist Party -- as a model for the United States to emulate when it comes to dealing with teachers.
"When I travel to China, for example," said Obama, "and I sit down with the mayor of Shanghai, and he talks about the fact that teaching is considered one of the most prestigious jobs and a teacher's getting paid the same as an engineer, that, I think, accounts for how well they're doing in terms of boosting their education system."
Obama's unstated assumption: Central planners, not the free market, ought to determine the value of a particular job and who gets paid what.
I say: Let the market decide -- especially in education.
The greatest problem with primary and secondary education in America today is precisely that it is dominated by government-run schools that people are compelled by force of law to pay for whether they like them or not and whether they send their children there or not. The second greatest problem is that the political power controlling these government-run schools has become increasingly centralized, gradually removing decision-making from local communities, passing it up to the state and federal level.
On NBC, Obama made clear he wants to use increased federal education spending to increase federal leverage over local schools, forcing policy changes preferred by him. That would move power in exactly the wrong direction.
The historical record compiled by the Department of Education itself shows that increased government spending on education does not improve the academic performance of government schools.
"From 1989-90 to 2006-07, total expenditures per student in public elementary and secondary schools rose from $8,748 to $11,839 (a 35 percent increase in 2008-09 constant dollars), with most of the increase occurring after 1997-98," says the Education Department's The Condition of Education 2010.
In 1980, 17-year-old students in public schools earned an average score of 284 out of 500 on the National Assessment of Educational Progress reading test. In 2008, they still scored 284. Despite increased per pupil spending, the needle did not move.
In 1999, 17-year-old students in American public schools earned an average score of 307 out of 500 on the National Assessment of Educational Progress math test. In 2008, they scored 305. The needle moved in the wrong direction.
Every community in America should give all parents a voucher equal to what it now pays per-pupil for its public schools, allowing those parents to use those vouchers at any school they choose. Let the market decide if government-run schools survive.
There’s this word I keep hearing.
Nullification
I wonder what that means.
It probably just means I’m a racist.
NO, NO, NO OBOZO, you have it all wrong – as usual!!
If you and your Marxist buds over at the Dept. of Indoctrination (Education) would pull out all the socialist PROPAGANDA (such as the extreme example at the link), and devote that time to actually educating these kids in critical thinking skills and the Three Rs, the school YEAR could probably be compressed into the school QUARTER.
A far better solution is for the incoming crop of new legislators to DEFUND the DOE, shut it down and then turn the states loose to scrap the entire rotten system for one where the parents decide where their kids are indoctri – er – educated.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7u0GJSZttZE
A true story.
In 1978, my wife and I came to know a young woman named Patty. She
was a devoutly religious young mother who’d become more devout when her
husband and father of her two small sons aged 2 and 6 informed her that he
was leaving. In dire economic straits, I offered to let her stay in our former home in Chamblee — which was not rented at the time – rent-free until she got back on her feet. She had been clandestinely home schooling the 6 year old for about 2 years using very well done Christian course materials from an organization in Texas the name of which escapes me. The lad had recently been tested and had placed at least a year ABOVE his chronological age. As required by the government school authorities at the time, she dutifully apprised the authorities of his scores.
For reasons which would become clear in a moment, Patty had been harassed by the DeKalb County school authorities for about 6 months and, by the time she moved into the Chamblee house, had been — unbeknownst to us — ORDERED to put the 6 year old into the nearest government elementary school or suffer the consequences. Because she wanted the boys to be educated Christians, there was no way she was going to do that and she told them so.
At approximately 2 am one morning, a loud knock on the door announced the arrival of the aforementioned “consequences.”
Dressed only in a nightgown, she was confronted by several burly police officers who thrust an arrest warrant in her face. With the now awakened 6 year old watching and the 2 year old wailing in the other room, she was handcuffed and led out the door to jail. She was tossed into a large cell with a couple of hookers and a junkie who spent much of the rest of that morning vomiting in the corner. The two young boys for whom the educational authorities professed such great concern were just left AT THE HOUSE — ALONE! Patty was later told that the bureaucrats from Children Services who were SUPPOSED to accompany the cops were late and, in their haste to get this dangerous miscreant behind bars, the cops just missed the fact that the Children Services people were, well, missing. The CS folks showed up an hour later to find two terrified kids, one of whom had just seen his mother hauled off in cuffs.
Patty was ultimately brought to trial under the Georgia Truancy Statutes. Her pro-bono attorney tore the school authorities to shreds and hers has been called THE case that opened the floodgates to home schooling in Georgia. Once they had all the facts, the jury didn’t take long to acquit her. I’m proud to have played a small part in that.
At Patty’s trial, a previously overlooked aspect of the government schools was put into sharp focus for those paying attention: The Director of Instruction for DeKalb County testified that the then current 7 hour school day consisted of an average of approximately 3 hours or less of instruction. At that time, Patty was devoting 4 to 5 hours a day to direct instruction.
He also as much as admitted that the REAL reason they wanted ALL these kids in school was the $3,000.00 per kid per year (I’m sure that number is MUCH higher today!) they then got from the state and federal government. Empty seats = lost funds. As in most things, follow the money.
Patty home schooled these two boys through high school.
And how did the boys turn out?
One is now a physician and the other a budding journalist.
But that now seems to be the norm for the growing legions of home schooled kids – which most likely explains why the NEA and the government school folks feel so threatened. For what it’s worth, a home schooled kid won the last National Spelling Bee.
Thomas Jefferson believed an EDUCATED PUBLIC to be the cornerstone of the system he and the other Founders TRIED to leave behind. He would NOT, I feel certain, be a big fan of the current government education system. If he returned today, he’d home school just as he did before.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0lR1KQq2-U
Dick Bachert
Oh, it's doing things. Indoctrination and warehousing come to mind. Babysitting the wee ones so the parents can work an extra job and pay in more taxes.
Not only is this a good idea, though not original, it is IMPERATIVE to the future of this amazing Republic! However, too many Americans have already been too dumbed down for the abolishment of government schools to become a reality. If we could go back to when property owners alone could vote, we may stand a chance. The Cancer of Corruption is growing in government, and without a dedicated pool of voters, there is viable antidote.
Also, there was more local control.
I went to a decent public school. Back when I was in high school in the 70s in Texas, the public schools had the best football teams and the best music programs along with decent academics. The private schools did not have those programs.
I’m in California not, and the public schools suck in our area. They don’t have good athletic programs or any arts. They have limited electives in high school. The only foreign language you can take is Spanish. The academics is lacking.
Needless to say, we’re sending our kids to a good private school that has the things that I used to get in public school. However, I will add that the private school is better. It’s Christian, and I love the Christian values being taught in the private school. I know the academics is also better than what I got in public school.
If schools in the US, public or private, want to compete internationally, they need to stop wasting time on multi-culturalism, junk science, and the touchy feely curicula that dominates the education system, and concentrate on the fundamentals. Basic mathematics, phonics, diagramming sentences etc; are not taught in most schools. They should be, followed by the classics of literature, algebra and Latin. Many educators feel the latter two should be introduced at age 7 to help develop those parts of the brain earlier.
In addition, my experience as a teacher has shown me that many parents don’t want their children challenged because it causes stress. Poor babies! The other big problem in US education is that we’re raising a generation of wimps who are consistently bailed out by babying parents. The children who succeed are challenged early, challenged often, and are backed by parents who strongly support their child being intellectually challenged on a regular basis.
The US Department of Education consists of over 5000 employees and has a budget of about 70 billion per year. Their primary function is to produce regulations and to perpetuate their own existence. They contribute nothing directly to the US education system.
“tuition tax credits would work.”
Refundable tuition tax credits are probably the most sensible approach to education (and health care). Another poster is correct that sending money to government only to have Uncle Sam send it right back is extremely wasteful. On the other hand, if we truly value education, we shouldn’t tax the expenditures parents make to provide it to their children.
Realistically, the lowest income families may not be able to afford private education (hence the “refundable” feature of tax credits). So long as the tax credits are for fixed dollar amounts (as opposed to paying X% of the tuition bill, which would stimulate massive inflation of the sort we’ve seen in health care) and perhaps pegged to the lowest available tuition rates in a given area, they will work fine to stimulate competition and choice.
Schoolteacher unions would hate this idea, which is a clue to how sensible it is. Unfunded retirement liabilities would become a thing of the past.
AMEN! The entire concept of government schools is Marxist to the core. This is not to say that there aren't good people in it, of course there are, but the system itself is rotten to the core.
The problem with the public school system is that, while it may have been, in the beginning, well-intentioned, with the main purpose of getting our children educated, it has been been transformed into a system of career guarantees for teachers and others who depend upon the system for lifetime jobs. Along with the teachers, we have unions whose only job is to guarantee their existence through maintaining the teachers happy with life-long jobs and great benefits, and protections against being terminated. Along the way, politicians figured out a way to make school systems and unions dependent upon government largess and protections.
So, the school system is not about educating our kids. It’s mostly about the teachers and the unions and the democratic party maintaining it’s hold on those unions and teachers, and thus, keeping within it’s party ranks, most of those who work in the system. Without the unions and the teachers, the democratic party would lose most elections. So, the kids suffer when the primary goal for the public school system is no longer about educating the kids.
If we pro rate the part-time salaries that we pay teachers into a full-time salary, then our teachers make more than many engineers. Also, maybe if engineers in Chin made more money, they wouldn't have to plagiarize the product design from the west.
Didn't he say that his mother while on welfare made all sorts of sacrifices to send him to a private school?
And here's the real danger of direct taxation. If the government can tax income they control what you do with that income and they have an excuse to examine all of your personal and business dealings. If they don't like how you use your money they will tax you at a higher rate (by not allowing deductions) because of it. If they are allowed to tax your property they can control what you do with it and you have to allow their inspector onto your property so that it can be "assessed" to determine what you will pay. With both income and property taxes there is no way to control what you will pay. With sales taxes you can avoid feeding the enemy by not buying stuff, or not buying as much.
I think that it should be totally dissolved, along with Dept of Energy, BATFE, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Federal Reserve, and NASA, since their mission is muslim cheerleaders and propagandists.
I agree with this
I don’t doubt it one bit, but with everything Government sticks it’s nose in the result is just the opposite
It was dribbling and oozing out of the document
I don't agree with every point in this post but am pinging it anyway.
I AGREEE. I didnt ask for these state education camps so why should I be FORCED to pay for them????? Abolish ALL public ed and move everything to the market. The market does a way better job then the gov. does.
He sends his girls to private school. Do as I say not as I do
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