First - It's Not About Education!
Education
suffers the fate of a whipping boy in the United States. It's failures
form a solid foundation for political debate and an excuse for withholding
the efforts that would keep it viable. Do you really think most of the
education debate in this country is really about making adults of the future
more productive and more competitive with people in other countries?
Do you think it's about making future adults better citizens or leveling the
economic playing field? Not a chance! Not even close! That
is only what it is supposed to be doing.
The number one Republican issue around education is school vouchers, a mechanism that effectively can funnel tax payer dollars into religious organizations. It is about teaching outside the envelop of the Constitution, but it is mostly about money, the lucrative private school incomes that are coveted by churches. Private schools in mass, are big money makers and churches are big business. It's easy to see public education as pork barrel waiting to be tapped.
What Value Education
The biggest beneficiary of a sound free public education system is the U.S.
business community. Oh yes, citizens of the future benefit too and so
does the government share in the wealth, but business gets the business in
the form of the best of the best and money that comes from being internationally
competitive. Education is not for making Jimmy and Jenny smarter.
Education is there for the long term good and competitiveness of the country.
It is a national security issue.
We can stupidly (yes, I have an opinion) educate only those who can afford to pay. We can fund education through tax relief so that only the children of prosperous families benefit. We can push education out to private, mostly religious schools (for which the objective data show are no more effective than public schools). We can shoot ourselves in both feet and enter the marathon of world economic power. We will end up a third-rate power and potentially unable to protect ourselves economically or militarily. We are doing a pretty good job of that right now by not fixing the public education system and while our government spends its way into a debt so large we can never hope to recover, let alone have the money to educate our children. We can do all that, but we can't sell it as living up to conservative ideology!
Public or Private?
The
most dramatic rise in standards of living and economic presence in world of
late has been among Asian countries. Countries like Taiwan and Vietnam
have made great leaps in prosperity. China has come from the back of
the pack to near the front in a very short time. Yes, these countries
have made smart long-term moves, like reducing debt and investing in infrastructure,
but they all have one other major thing in common. They have educated
their people. They have not told poor people, "Find the money and
you get an education." They have said, "Everyone must have
the opportunity to be educated for the future strength of our nation."
We, in the USA, once said that same thing and on those words, we mounted the
best public education system in the world. It is the same system we
have now basically abandoned.
It's a bit ironic that most of these dozen or so Asian countries have looked to the history of the United States and the words of Thomas Jefferson, "The object [of my education bill was] to bring into action that mass of talents which lies buried in poverty in every country for want of the means of development, and thus give activity to a mass of mind which in proportion to our population shall be the double or treble of what it is in most countries." --Thomas Jefferson to M. Correa de Serra, 1817. ME 15:156. And so it was. We embarked on the road to public education and thereby became the greatest nation on earth. Other, once impoverished countries, have followed our example to greatness while we continue to slide backward. Should we now look to see which country will overtake us first or should we recover our fumble and return to educating the masses for the future and the security of our own nation?
The Drive for Vouchers
The
positive argument for school vouchers is choice. Choice is an important
thing in a free society. With school vouchers any parent can send his
or her child to any school they choose assuming they can find a school that
will accept their student and they can afford the transportation. At
first glance, vouchers seems to be the handguns of education; the great equalizers.
With vouchers, anyone can (theoretically) get their child out of a poor performing
school and into a good one.
The argument against school vouchers goes to the very purpose of public education. Indeed, some of the people who are the strongest advocates of school vouchers don't believe in and don't want public education at all. In fact, many don't believe in compulsory education, arguing that education is up to parents (and the church) and no business of government. Beyond the lunacy of that, the argument against vouchers is about the quality of education. Yes, those religious and private schools that we all assume are doing so well are not necessarily better.
A study (US Education Department 2006) of more than 7,000 schools nationally demonstrates that children of similar socioeconomic backgrounds perform comparably in public and private schools. In fact no broad objective study has shown anything else. Vouchers will simply dismantle the existing educational system and allow federal tax money to be funneled to churches.
Another important reason vouchers won't be good for education is probable lack of participation. Private and religious schools highly value their autonomy. A recent U.S. Department of Education report, conducted at the request of Congress, indicates that private and religious schools are unlikely to participate in a voucher program that would require them to meet accountability standards. They want the money without any accountability. The reasons are simple. Among them are fundamental disagreement on what to teach. Religious schools want to be able to teach religion, even if it will deny science. None of the schools are keen on needing to report the specifics of what they teach or whether the students are actually getting an education. It is not likely or reasonable that we should be expected to hand over huge amounts of tax dollars to schools without some reasonable level of accountability.
Proponents of vouchers want exactly that. True conservatives want freedom and want to protect America in the future both economically and physically, but they don't want to hand out tax dollars without accountability.
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