The decline of American public education, documented by a plethora of objective tests for decades, is so well known it requires no documentation here. What I wish to address here goes beyond the academic failure. It is about the way school regulations now are regimenting all aspects of the children’s lives, what they eat and drink—even their play during recess. Predictably, the results are less favorable for the children.
In his book Inside American Education, Thomas Sowell writes:
They have used our children as guinea pigs for experiments, targets for propaganda.
They have taken our money, betrayed our trust, failed our children.
They have proclaimed their dedication to freedom of ideas and the quest for truth, while turning educational institutions into bastions of dogma and the most intolerant institutions in American society.
Schools have become totalitarian compounds, where an autocratic administration arrogates to itself the power dictate whatever it thinks is best for the children, irrespective of the role and rights of the parents.
Remember the campaign to remove from schools vending machines dispensing soft drinks and snacks, a measure that was supposed to help combat childhood obesity? Who could be against that? Are you in favor of childhood obesity? Few people bothered to ask if the measure would be effective or if it was the schools’ role to police what children put into their mouths.
Did you think the issue would stop with banning the vending machines? If so, you should have known better. Next was banning children from bringing soft drinks and snacks from home. And school cafeterias had to be prohibited from serving french fries, pizzas, and other items the children like and substituting foods with fewer calories and less salt and sugar.
While the president’s October announcement of a plan to expedite Congress’s reduction of required payments on student loans from 15 percent of annual discretionary income to 10 percent might prove useful to reelection efforts, the long-term utility of such a measure remains a question.
With college enrollment tripling in the last ten years, default rates through the roof, and graduate debt levels mounting, it is little wonder that the president is attempting to diffuse the “higher education bubble.”
Indeed, the recent “Occupy Wall Street” movements are a testament to these rising costs to diminishing payoffs. High on protestors’ lists of demands is forgiveness of college loans. And while the motivations of the “occupiers” may lack substance, it’s becoming harder and harder to ignore the millions of recent and not-so-recent graduates struggling to hoist themselves out of debt despite low-paying (and increasingly non-existent) jobs.
The Wall Street Journal is out with a video editorial discussing the Parent Trigger on it’s first birthday—and the Heartland Institute’s contribution to chronicling and explaining the parent empowerment law.
At about the 1:48 mark, David Feith and Jason Riley discuss (but don’t name outright) this recent Heartland Policy Study on California’s experience with the Parent Trigger.
We couldn’t be prouder of our own Bruno Behrend, who recently drove up to a Tea Party Rally in Sheboygan, WI (otherwise known as “real America”) to talk about school reform — getting the crowd excited about breaking up the government education complex.
There’s nothing as satisfying as letting someone else say “I told you so” – instead of having to do it yourself. So I will let Greg Forster, one of the Jay P. Greene blog writers, do it for me. The issue is the “common core standards” movement: the idea that states are too incompetent or lazy to develop decent standards for educational attainment for their students, and that a sort of model, ideal, “common core” set of standards could be developed and merely serve as a spur to greater achievement for the states.
Jay Greene and his colleagues have been warning Common Core cheerleaders – the most avid of whom are at Checker Finn’s Fordham Institute, together with Tom Hess of AEI – of the dangers here.
Thanks to The Washington Examiner for publishing my piece today bout how the teachers unions in Connecticut worked behind the scenes to neuter the Parent Trigger school reform. The AFT bragged of their success on their website for days — until the cynical documents started to gather attention, at which point the union erased it from the site.
An excerpt of my op-ed:
The bill approved by Connecticut legislators allows the councils of elected community members only to advise school officials rather than empowering them to force needed reforms.
The report also touts as “karma” that “the chief legislative proponent of the original parent trigger bill lost his re-election in November 2010″ and “the House Co-Chair [who allowed the bill to move forward] lost his race for Majority Leader and has a thorny relationship with the Black and Puerto Rican Caucus on education issues.”
The report also makes clear AFT officials must be hoping Biddle’s discovery does not become more widely known because it destroys the union’s carefully erected image as reform-minded partners who love to “collaborate” with parents and communities.
Call me an optimist (perhaps it’s my relative youth), but America’s independent streak is widening more than ever when it comes to school reform, and that hearkens positive prospects for upcoming months and years.
In this case, establishment publication EdWeek reports on “frustrated” parents and educators growing louder in rejecting federal and bureaucratic impositions in classrooms.
Organizers say the effort aims to galvanize and give voice to those who believe policymakers, including U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and state governors, have gone astray in their remedies for improving American schools. Leaders of the march—current and former educators among them—say they’re determined to build a grassroots movement that has staying power beyond the gathering this summer and “restores” a central role for educators, parents, and communities in policy decisions.
Peter Meyer at EdNext chronicles his must-read experience as a school board member for a small town in upstate New York. Recently, his board voted 4-3 to impose an extra 10 percent in local taxes and cut 22 teachers to deal with a large budget shortfall against an overwhelming ballot-box defeat of the taxing measure by local taxpayers.
Of course, there were other options. The teachers union had adamantly rejected a salary freeze—which would have saved an estimated $300,000. To them, a tax increase was much more palatable. Why? A couple of Sundays ago, leaving church, a district official pulled me aside and whispered, “You didn’t ask how many teachers live in the district.” “No,” I said—and then I guessed, “fifty percent.” She smiled. “Try 13 percent.” So the vast majority had no qualms with sticking it to local property owners. In fact, many of these other teachers lived in districts that were increasing tax levies by just one and two percent (and where teachers were taking wage freezes!).
Jay P. Greene has written a post on his blog today that should, if there were any justice, be inscribed on letters of gold blazoned across the sky. But since there isn’t any justice, I’ll quote from it liberally right here:
The problem is that foundations are no substitute for market forces in identifying what works and what doesn’t for kids. Rather than focusing on picking winners and losers, foundations should focus on pushing the idea that we need stronger market forces.
Jay is talking about the results of a new report released by Andrew Coulson at Cato today, which tracked the performance of students at various charter school networks in California. Coulson compared the most successful schools with the support given by philanthropies. Coulson’s conclusion is dire:
After pulling back from its adoption of Common Core standards, South Carolina has also decided to avoid federal education strings by declining to participate in the next round of Race to the Top, a federal competition for stimulus funds. Said State Superintendent Mick Zais:
The Race to the Top program expands the federal role in education by offering pieces of silver in exchange for strings attached to Washington. More federal money for education will not solve our problems. Schools need less, not more, federal intrusion to increase student achievement. The previous two rounds of Race to the Top were not competitive grant programs; they were top-down directives forcing states to adopt programs favored by Washington. Respectfully, South Carolina will not apply for this money.
Until this point, states have largely preferred to sign away their powers to the federal government in exchange for money. (Dare we say, a “mess of pottage”?) This is how Congress gets states to do what it wants when it has no Constitutional authority to command it. This, however, marks something different.
(Cross-posted from American Liberty.)
