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Well, the new school year is here and once again I am braced for the inevitable battle. Like many Americans I’ve spent years advocating education reform but the bureaucrats in education deny that standards have slipped or that many of their new teaching methods are part of the problem. They deny that basic education has been replaced by indoctrination and “training”. They still say they need more money. Lawmakers across the country who sought the truth found that public schools had abandoned standardized testing as a means of gauging the effectiveness of the new teaching methods and like many other states, New York is reintroducing those standards. The Liberal extremists in our public schools complained that they would have to “teach to the test” and that “real” education as they saw it, would suffer. To placate the teacher unions, the passing grade for the new Regents tests was set at 55% but more than ½ the students taking the first test, failed! Over the past couple of years grades have increased but wouldn’t they have to? I wrote about it in a local newspaper a couple of years ago and the paper printed a responding letter by a local woman who suggested that my “opinion” was politically motivated. She wrote that the real reason that more students were passing the new Regents tests was because of all the money we were spending. I suspected that she was the one who was politically motivated because Liberals have a tendency of accusing others of the very things that they are guilty of. It’s part of their pathology. Psychologists call it “projecting”. Sure enough, after asking a few people in her town (Guilderland) I learned that she was an administrator at the Board of Cooperative Educational Services. How pathetic. Education reformers wanted school choice but we settled for testing only as a means of proving the need for school choice. Testing proves that our public schools are not preparing our children for life in a world where they have to compete globally. Most of our socio-economic woes can be attributed to a lack of knowledge of capitalism and its roll in American life. Our public school teachers do not understand that they and many of the parents who sycophantically support them have been indoctrinated into the same anti-capitalist ideology that they are passing on to their children. Most of the publicly employed educators I’ve met in my struggle have stood in the way of progress. Some stand in the way of real reform such as school choice and charter schools because they know these alternatives will outperform and threaten their monopolistic public schools. Others stand in the way because they have been indoctrinated in schools just like the ones in which they are employed, which means that they can’t think for themselves. They cannot utilize deductive reasoning to reach a conclusion about anything. They simply learned what they were told and that’s the way it is. If you try to wake them up, their eyes glaze over. They go catatonic. Then there are the politically motivated unionists. They are using public schools for social engineering. They gauge their success by how well their students parrot their extreme left-wing views. To get high marks their students simply need to show their support for the environment, animals and uninhibited sex. They get extra points if they protest anything traditional like pledging allegiance to the flag, religious expression, or the military. True to form the AFT (American Federation of Teachers) has started the new school year by kicking off an anti-Walmart campaign. They have also continued to deflect responsibility to parents by demanding more parental involvement and “cooperation”. There are numerous problems with this approach: It only works for those students whose parents have time to do it. Those of us who work the most and thereby pay the most school taxes don’t have the time to do your job for you. Public schools ought to be supplementing what parents teach (cooperating) not vice-versa. If we had time to home school we would and parents that home school do so partly because they don’t agree with the social indoctrination that permeates public school curricula. I have tried to “cooperate” with my children’s public school by assisting them with their homework assignments but I have found a great deal of misinformation being presented as fact. I have approached their teachers on numerous occasions and found them uncooperative or even argumentative and belligerent. With the election of George W. Bush and many other Republican leaders, we are finally getting a small degree of the accountability we’ve been demanding. The “No Child Left Behind” law is such a small step toward accountability that it’s hard to understand the resistance to it. The education establishment just keeps chanting: “More money, more money”. Charter schools are another small step toward improving public schools but it’s not enough and the education establishment will justify their resistance to it by how little improvement results from it. The flaw in our education system is fundamental in nature. It cannot be fixed with band-aids. States began making compulsory participation in taxpayer funded public schools part of their Constitutions about 150 years ago. In doing so they did not create a Constitutional right as is being claimed by the Campaign for Fiscal Equity here in New York and by similar lawsuits in other states. They actually took away our constitutional right to choose. Think about it. Is there any Constitutional right that citizens are forced to engage in? Must we pray, vote, speak or own a gun? Would religion and gun ownership be better if they were taxpayer funded and compulsory?
No amount of money can do
for education what can be done with one little word. If a basic education is a
right, it must include CHOICE. DRC
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