by C.J. Carnacchio
Little Johnny can't read, write, or do basic math, but he feels good about himself and he knows how to put on a condom. Johnny is the product of the American public education system a system controlled by a costly, ineffective, bloated government bureaucracy and greedy teachers' unions. A system that sees students as guinea pigs for liberal social experiments. A system that strives for mediocrity over excellence.
Whenever the subject of educational reform arises, liberal politicians and "educrats" begin chanting the same tired mantra of "more schools, more equipment, more teachers, more money!" The nation spends $300 billion a year ($6,800 per student) on a system that has produced rising illiteracy and dropout rates coupled with plummeting test scores and the educrats still demand more. The true solution to the educational malaise lies in the de-nationalization and privatization of the country's school system.
The most basic argument in favor of denationalization is that federal intervention in education is unconstitutional. Education is one of the powers reserved to the states by the Tenth Amendment, which states: "The powers not delegated to the Untied States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." Therefore, all forms of federal aid and regulation in this area are illegal.
Next, governmentrun schools are a protected monopoly. Compulsory attendance laws and taxbased financing protect them from competing to offer quality educational products. The absence of competition for customers and funding eliminates an effective quality control mechanism by which customer feedback is translated into direct action. Taxpayers must pay for education regardless of its quality and regardless of whether or not their children go to a public school.
The problem is not that we are spend too little on education but that the mammoth bureaucracy controlling education gives us so little in return. As Cato Institute Executive VicePresident David Boaz cites in Libertarianism: A Primer, "From 1960 to 1984 enrollment in American public schools rose by only 9 percent, while the number of teachers rose by 57 percent and the number of principals and supervisors rose by 79 percent. Meanwhile, the number of personnel who were neither teachers nor supervisors rose by 500 percent yet somehow every school system with budget cuts announces that it would have to lay off teachers, not bureaucrats."
Bureaucratic monopolies are inherently inefficient. A bureaucracy's top priority is to sustain itself and channel whatever resources remain into its field of responsibility. When the government creates a bureaucracy to deal with a particular problem and that problem worsens, the government effectively rewards the bureaucracy with a bigger budget to deal with a bigger task. This does not punish the bureaucracy for failing to achieve its purpose. In essence, there is an incentive for bureaucrats to perpetuate problems in order to sustain themselves. Failure becomes an incentive. Why should a bureaucracy solve its problem when that problem is its mealticket? The educational bureaucracy serves as an impenetrable barrier against citizens' efforts to reform the system.
Private schools provide quality education at a considerably lower cost than public schools, since private schools respond directly to market forces without stagnant bureaucracies. The free market is the best instrument for producing optimal output at a minimal cost. Competition is the key. Competition forces people to try bold new ideas, adopt the ideas of successful competitors, cut costs, and eliminate waste. Competition guarantees steady progress in a given field and discourages stagnation. Businesses must compete to offer the best product for the lowest price, so why shouldn't schools do the same?
When the market is the final arbiter, consumers' needs are satisfied, since consumers are the market. The possibility of failure is a powerful incentive to meet consumers' needs. In the private sector, businesses must attract customers or they fail. If they fail, investors lose money and employees lose their jobs.
Privatization would also elevate the caliber of teachers by making their salaries responsive to market forces. Teachers' salaries are not, contrary to popular belief, too low. Poor teachers are grossly overpaid, while good teachers are severely underpaid. Salaries tend to be determined by seniority, degrees received, and teaching certificates, not actual merit. The present salary structure promotes mediocre, uninspiring teachers rather than those who are creative and confident.
The injection of market competition would reward merit and help develop talented teachers. No longer be mired in bureaucratic red tape, teachers would at last be allowed to be creative and independent. Their innovative approaches to education would in turn attract parents. Teachers would be given the chance to become more successful (i.e., raises, profit sharing) by producing successful students. They would also face the possibility of losing their jobs if they failed. Tenure laws would no longer be a shield for the mediocre.
Teachers' unions like the National Education Association tend to favor standard salary scales and oppose a meritbased system. As Forbes magazine once noted, "The union's growing power has exactly coincided with the dismal spectacle of rising spending on education with deteriorating results." Boaz points out that according to Keith Geiger, president of the NEA, 40 percent of big-city public school teachers send their children to private school. Do they know something we don't?
Public schools have become the indoctrination centers and propaganda machines of the Left. Post-modernism, multiculturalism, and feelgood psychology have replaced the three "Rs." Children are taught what the State wants them to learn. That curriculum often conflicts with the parent's beliefs and values. But it is the parents, and society, that will have to live with the results of this educational gobbledygook while the "educrats" move on to a new generation of guinea pigs. We forget that the purpose of schools is not to tinker with society, but rather to educate individuals.
By subscribing to the Deweyite notion that every child must have the same education, we have failed to build a system that will challenge the intellects and cultivate the talents of our best students. As the political sage Russell Kirk once observed, "By the conclusion of the twentieth century America may have achieved complete equality in education: everybody compulsorily schooled, and everybody equally ignorant."
The current governmentrun monopoly, with its onesizefitsall approach to education, cannot adequately reflect the values of all parents in our diverse society. The danger in having one approach universally taught is that there is no single correct view, no official orthodoxy, not only in academic subjects like history, but in the world generally.
A privatized system would enable parents to wrestle power away from the educational intelligentsia and have their children educated according to their preferences. There would be no single stateenforced orthodoxy. Different children could be taught different things. Competition would promote a healthy variety of schools and teaching methods, and parents would be able to choose from a wide variety of options. It is the height of arrogance to suggest that socalled educational elites should override parents in deciding what to teach their children.
A private system would allow parents the freedom to express their views about their children's education by withdrawing them from one school and sending them to another. Most parents are competent judges of how well their children are being educated, by simply observing and listening to them. A parent deciding which school best suits his child's needs has a far greater incentive to postulate an informed opinion than one who just ships his kid off to the local public school.
Opponents argue that a privatized system will lead to a gap between the poor and the wealthy. But even in public education there is a great disparity between the way the two groups are educated. Just look at the difference between affluent suburban schools verses poor innercity schools. A privatized system would actually help reduce that inequality. Most parents could afford to pay for their children's education out of their current income. Most already pay for their child's education through taxation. Since private schools provide education at a lower cost than public schools, most parents would actually face a lower financial burden.
The private system would also be less dominated by geography. Poor parents could send their kids to better schools, no longer limited to their local school district. The private system would give parents real control over their children's education. The power of the consumer operating in the market would make up for the poor's lack of political power in the public system. The poor have the same economic power as anyone else in that they have the ability to choose whom they buy from.
Well, it's twenty years later. Little Johnny is all grown up. He is unemployed, homeless and eating scraps from a dumpster. Cheer up Johnny. I hear a shipment of government cheese just arrived.
C.J.Carnacchio is a staff writer for the Review. He thinks that the free market and cheesy poofs are da' bomb!