Education:
Who's It For?
Clearly, education should be for anyone and everyone. The question we will deal with is what government's role should be, if any, and what recent history suggests should be done.
The public education system in the United States is arguably an abject failure. Today's classrooms are generally unruly, in comparison to just a few decades ago, even dangerous in many locations. Graduation rates are horrendous; motivation for teachers, students, and administrators is comparatively low; and the United States is slowly losing the global battle for the future.
What has gone wrong? The National Education Association (NEA), the teachers union, is a politically active organization, using its platform to espouse any number of issues completely unrelated to education or the careers of their members. Take a look at their home page to see where their priorities are. One would think that a downhill slide of respect for teachers (by both students and parents), low morale, low pay, inadequate support, failed administrative policies, poor test results year after year, and insufficient security/safety would be wake-up calls.
Government seemed to recognize that something needed to change a few years ago. The debate centered on "vouchers" that would permit tax money to be used, in a competitive environment, for private schools, if/when parents chose to exercise that choice. The opposition, particularly from NEA and others of their ilk, made it clear that teaching, motivating, educating, and mentoring students are not their goals. In the face of overwhelming evidence that there are bad teachers, bad administrators, and bad public school systems, the union rose up solely to protect the jobs of their members, without any regard whatsoever for the students' well-being. They have vigorously opposed any attempts at evaluating teachers and schools. They have proposed not a single concept that could improve the dismal results, yet they demand that the status quo be granted for the foreseeable future. What's wrong with this picture?
Isn't it amazing that "home schooling" has a laudable track record? No NEA involved. No school administrators making idiotic decisions ejecting children for bringing an aspirin to school or kissing a 6-year-old on the cheek. No use of our publicly funded schoolhouses as social platforms to advance "alternative lifestyle" agendas, revisionist history, eliminating "intelligent design" from reasonable discussions to explain mankind on earth, and sending children home to castigate their parents for everything from recycling to global warming to how they vote.
The public school system, and the government responsible for it, has permitted a host of purposes completely unrelated to education to permeate and destroy the investment we have made in our children's future–the future of our nation. Voters have permitted it to happen; parents have permitted it to happen. Apathy and unfounded trust have handed generations of children to the whims and incredibly obtuse purposes of a union with political clout.
The system is so broken, it is unlikely it can be fixed. The near-term answer is to permit wholesale use of a voucher system to, through competition, eliminate the failures and reward the successes. Require testing of students and evaluations of teachers. Fire the bad ones. Encourage, reward, and revere the good ones. In other words, start over. Undo the damage that the NEA has been party to.
Take back our country.
