The Left only supports undeserved transfers because that buys votes.
Fred on Everything nails it in his latest column. We’re Effed.
Onward into the Night (Or Uganda, Anyway)
March 14, 2014
Despite much wringing of teeth and gnashing of hands about the decline in schooling in the United States, I have seen very little concrete comparison between then and now, whatever one means by “then.” In my small way, as a mere anecdote in a sea of troubles, I hereby offer an actual comparison. Permit me to preview the result: Much of the United States has sunk to the level of the lower ranks of the Third World.
http://fredoneverything.net/SchoolsBrooklyn.shtml
Excellent piece. I’ve made that argument to my leftist friends whenever they try to argue “inequality.” And I really make them mad when I say I agree and we can lay it all at the feet of the public school establishment and the teachers unions. They either go ballistic or they shut up.
There is a leftist answer to this: busing. They do it in Raleigh, NC, where I went to high school. The Leesville and, later, Wakefield districts were brand new, very nice multi-grade campuses with nice, expensive homes nearby. Then, since it’s unfair to the downtown Raleigh kids for white bread types to have good schools, they bused the, ah, “urban” youth into those school districts. Leesville and Wakefield both are now crap with plummeting safety standards (couldn’t tell you if their test scores are falling, too, but it would follow).
Once again, instead of lifting up the bottom element, they drag the top down to the bottom, so everyone can equally share in the misery.
We were never wealthy but were lucky. We made enough to send our kids through the Catholic School System in Mpls/St. Paul. Their education was as good as any and better than most.
The Public School System in our neighborhood has some celebrated failures that make it child abuse to send kids to them. Even our worst schools don't have a 95% failure rate.
If our only available public education resource guaranteed a failed life for my kid, I would have to take a run at home schooling. If I could not possibly do worse that paid teachers, why not at least try?
Said another way, children of higher-IQ professionals are more likely to be high-IQ themselves, and thus able to score high on standardized tests.
The one thing that few people are willing to voice, is that the real problem is not low-quality schools, but low-quality students.
That said, one thing that would lift up scores, would be better competence tests for teachers. At the very least, they should be able to score in the top 10% on the tests that are administered to their students. Any unable to score high on tests of their subject matter should be fired.
Government employee unions (like the teachers union) can't stand up to scrutiny. The success of charter schools and vouchers exposes them to the sunlight, which makes them look very bad. Their position is to just hide the rotting carcass of public education and spend more money on failure.
Krugman’s argument is typical doublespeak. Obama, and the rest of the 1% send their children to private schools because the public schools are a mess (Krugman has no children of his own so he hasn’t made the choice). He opposes vouchers, not because they don’t work, but because he expects the upper middle class to “top off the vouchers” so they can send their children to better schools. What Krugman fails to acknowledge is the wealthy and most parents in the middle and upper middle class who can do so either send their children to private school or home school them.
As to the fear the topping off of vouchers will lead to a demand for lower funding of public education by the affluent, wouldn’t that have already happened? His premise is that parents who pay taxes for the public schools and 100% of the private school tuition for their own children are suddenly going to demand lower funding for public education when they begin receiving voucher’s from the state to partially offset the private tuition they are paying? Contrary to what Krugman indicates, those affluent parents are more likely to support programs from which they receive a benefit than those which provide zero benefit to them.
In any event, the proposition can be tested. Take the federal government completely out of public education. Let the states that want to experiment with vouchers do so and those who don’t keep the current system. Measure the performance of the students today and again in 10 and 20 years. A twenty year trial will demonstrate best practice.
One thing we know for sure. Today’s public education system condemns most of the children participating in it to mediocrity. More of the same isn’t the answer unless you are childless and live in an academic ivory tower completely insulated from reality.
Has anyone looked at the Forever stamps put out by the Post Office?
The have a flag on the stamps and the stamps say, Justice, Freedom, Liberty, and.......Equality.
Uh, our country has never before espoused “equality” as anything other than we are all born equal in the eyes of God. The outcome in America is up to the individual.