Posted on 07/22/2020 7:52:20 AM PDT by Kaslin
When public school districts have a monopoly, they can easily justify delaying school or implementing extended closures. School choice is the solution.
Across the country, school districts are announcing delayed openings or full-on closures for the semester or year. In its place, they will offer virtual learning as they did in the spring.
Despite President Trump’s clear opposition to this (or because of it), school district leaders insist that a risk of a COVID-19 outbreak is too great to safely reopen schools. This is doubtful, seeing that schools would have to be “guaranteeing that no one will get sick if schools reopen,” as Ben Domenech puts it. Even if they reopen, many schools are following or being forced to follow Centers for Disease Cotrol guidelines that require students and teachers to wear a mask, sit six feet apart, and sanitize their hands every hour.
Nevertheless, studies show that children, and even the teachers, are not seriously threatened by COVID, such that they have more of a chance of dying from the seasonal flu. As White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany stated, “The science is very clear on this…the science is on our side here. We encourage our localities & states to just simply follow the science. Open our schools.” Indeed, the political leaders and unions calling for school closings are largely following their feelings, not science. Not even a majority of the public supports this, as shown in a recent Gallup poll.
Additionally, the online model for learning simply doesn’t work as well as face-to-face instruction, and American students are falling behind. While the hope is that today’s tech-savvy youth will log in to their computers, watch their video lectures, and create amazing projects with peers using Zoom, the reality is that most kids rarely log in to do anything yet receive a passing grade anyway.
Another year of this, explains Joy Pullmann, will set American “kids back in math by a year or two … [and] will short our economy tens of trillions of dollars.” In today’s world, the American economy will not be able to compete with the rest of the world with an undereducated workforce with insufficient math or reading skills.
The scientific data and the “essential” nature of a good education in today’s economy are the likely reasons other countries have already opened their schools. Not only are nations that took a more laissez-faire response to COVID-19 doing this — countries like Sweden — but also ones that took stricter measures like France, Taiwan, Germany, South Korea, and even Canada. Somehow, proponents of school closures have to believe that U.S. students are more at risk than their neighbors up north.
By most evidence, it could very well be the case that two months from now that American students will be sitting at home, pretending to do schoolwork while the rest of the world has already made its way down the curve of COVID-19 infections. Parents who could have been working and earning money for their children will continue relying on future taxpayers’ checks to stay afloat. And taxpayers will continue funding teachers and administrators for devising what often amounts to imitations of free educational websites like Kahn Academy or Crash Course.
Most Americans may sympathize now with administrators and teachers not wanting to return to work — it’s still summer after all — but this will probably change when the hype behind a COVID resurgence becomes apparent. Instead of seeing professionals properly respond to a legitimate threat, they will see a group of irresponsible hacks exploiting a crisis. In too many cases, it will be mass complacency causing these closures, not reasonable fear.
If there was ever an argument for school choice, this is it. When enrollment dollars are on the line, delaying school or doing extended closures would be unthinkable. But when public school districts have a monopoly, then they can easily justify this move.
Whether or not they offer a genuinely good education or even stay open, most students have to attend these schools because they have nowhere else to go. By contrast, private businesses cannot hold their customers captive this way. If they close, they lose customers and go bankrupt — which is exactly what happened to many companies during the COVID-19 shutdowns.
More importantly, school choice rewards passionate, hardworking teachers with better compensation and actual students to teach. Right now, there isn’t much incentive to be brave and go to work, nor is there extra compensation for those who provide high-quality instruction. No school is competing for students or the best teachers; rather, they are competing for government funds and more relaxed standards, which only incentivize questionable excuses and weak performances.
A frequent — though lacking — argument against school choice has been that education is much too important to put in the hands of private entities that will do a worse job, foster inequality, and serve the interests of billionaires. The widespread failure of public schools in low-income areas, however, negates this objection, particularly when contrasted with their successful charter school counterparts. Public school students are especially harmed in these systems, learning little besides how the United States is an evil country and how they are victims of a corrupt system.
At its core, education is a service like any other: its quality depends more on incentives than mere goodwill. True, it’s a service to which all Americans are entitled, but this doesn’t mean it has to be mediocre and inconstant like most government-provided services. When good teachers are rewarded, parents have a choice, and every school is competing to have the brightest and happiest students, the country could experience a renaissance that even a pandemic like COVID-19 could not suppress.
For now, schools and teachers like myself need to get back to work while elected leaders consider ways to avoid this problem in the future. For, even when the shutdowns cease — and many are betting this will probably happen around November 4 or so — people can expect more periodic shutdowns the future, at least with schools, and no one has set a limiting principle.
Threatening a shutdown is an effective way to force compliance, and no, not even Republicans are immune to this temptation. Therefore, the only real way to keep the schools open is to reward good teachers, and best serve the students is offering parents a choice once and for all.
Auguste Meyrat is an English teacher in the Dallas area. He holds an MA in humanities and an MEd in educational leadership. He is the senior editor of The Everyman and has written essays for The Federalist, The American Conservative, and The Imaginative Conservative, as well as the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture.
Paying people(teachers) to not work is a Democrat Dream
Unions are involved. Not surprising that they are trying to find out how to get paid for doing no work.
Public school teachers get paid, school or no school.
I just paid my property taxes most of which go to public schools, no school since mid March here, no rebate of the public school tax.
Teachers paid,
Why would they want to go back to work?
absolutely
of course they are.
Yeah well in CA even the private schools were all closed—indefinitely—by the governor Friday. So “school choice” is no panacea.
I do think the private schools will be the first to reopen—those teachers/schools do want to teach in person and clearly value children and education—because even after the governor agrees, the unions will keep the public schools shut. The entire year. Or longer. They’ve already stated “until there is a vaccine” which there may never be. They are incredibly powerful.
The United States is now poised to fall further behind in STEM. H1-Bs are not going to be going away now. . .the rest of the world—all of Europe and Asia—has reopened their schools, and the United States has not and apparently will not.
It’s not easy for most parents to teach Calculus at home—the basis for a lot of STEM majors.
I may be in a tiny minority here, but I actually support the NEA on this one. I place the blame for all this sh!t squarely on every governor who imposed any lockdown orders over the last 3-4 months -- along with the Trump administration, too.
You can’t run around issuing national emergency declarations, shutting down schools and businesses, and clamoring about a “war” against an “invisible enemy” ... and then expect people to just take your word for it when you tell them it’s OK to go back to work, school, etc.
Back in the early spring the American public was told that these shutdowns were necessary for TWO WEEKS -- to "flatten the curve."
We're still dealing with this sh!t -- FOUR F#%&ING MONTHS LATER.
These teachers have all the leverage they need to stay home from work indefinitely.
Good luck putting this genie back in the bottle, all you morons out there who bought into this hysteria back in March.
The GOP had some 30 years to develop a good alternative to the failed Public schools that they could be rolling out as we speak, but they failed. If they had one the teachers unions would be running over old ladies to get back to their classrooms.
Teachers salaries NOT cut off?
Meh. Home schooling is easy now, with curriculums and support on the internet, and sites like khanacademy.com.
Public schools are a 19th century paradigm that outlived its usefulness in the early 21st century. It’s primary function now is for a jobs program for over-educated candidates and a day care system for parents that have sold themselves into indentured slavery.
So parents can band together and hire tutors who can teach this stuff. People like my hubby-then-fiance, for instance, who is the only reason I got through calc in college. He, or someone just like him, would make a dandy STEM tutor.
THIS IS INSANE (Kansas)
Governor Kelly’s executive order delaying school reads, in pertinent part, “K-12 public and private schools shall not allow attendance, instruction, athletic practice or competition, rehearsal, performance, or other interaction of an instructional manner—including virtual, online, and any other . . . indirect means of providing instruction—between faculty/staff and students of public or private K-12 schools from August 10, 2020, through Sept. 8, 2020 ....”
In other words, our children can’t go to school in person because of coronavirus. Also, our children cannot be taught online because of coronavirus. I am a loss to figure out what kind of science and data could possibly support such an internally inconsistent policy..
The teachers unions are basically political organizations engaged in a criminal conspiracy.
Grandchild finished up last year “on line”.
Her school is about 1/2 from the rich old part of town and the other 1/2 from a low wealth (poor) part of town.
The poor kids were conspicuously absent from the classes.
I would expect the same this coming fall.
Unions for government employees should be illegal.
Yes, the government schools should close permanently. Where is a Republican bold enough to suggest taking the tax money spent on public ed and giving it back to parents so they can choose a private school? See how the education bureaucracy feels about that.
The school closings have left parents who are concerned about their child's education (and there are a lot of them) scrambling to find other solutions--and they are finding them.
Education pods are becoming a thing. Call it the return of the one room school house or small group private tutoring. Many parents are going to find it works better for their children. At which point they will ask: why should I send my kids back to (inferior) public schools. And then they will ask: why shouldn't the school system help me pay for this.
I predict a year from now, we'll be hearing calls for a "the money should follow the child" system, instead of a "the money belongs to the public school" system which we currently have.
Call it school choice or vouchers or whatever. The demand is going to be there.
"We need to keep the schools closed so poor Americans have no chance of keeping up with wealthy Americans who can be educated at home through online classes."
If this approach gets enough traction, you'll have Democrats running around opening schools at gunpoint.
If only we had a privately run education system,
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