Excellent Article on Effects of Vouchers and Education Choice

James Agresti, a rare Brown University graduate who appears to have thwarted Brown's concerted efforts to mold all of its graduates into Progressive Elitist tribalists, has written an excellent article on the effects of vouchers and education choice.  The article is published on the Foundation for Economic Education website and called DeVos Confirmed: Everything they said about her is false.

Reforming our government-run and controlled education system is one of the most important requirements for developing a civil society with a properly limited government, a broad respect for and protection of individual rights, and the freedom for individuals to choose their own values and to manage their own lives within a richly diverse and cooperative private sector.  These reforms also have the beneficial effect of reducing the political power of the teachers labor unions.  Both government-run schools and teachers labor unions are ham-handed supporters of big, awfully big government, collectivism, and the splintering of the American people into countless tribes at war with one another.

Public School Monopoly Favored by Obama over Education

I have long opposed the government monopoly on our school system and education.  There is only a path to less and less freedom so long as this monopoly control continues.  It is the greatest of all impediments to the protection of individual rights in the USA.  The government will always use the schools as a propaganda tool to gain more and more power for itself at the expense of our liberties.  Children are rarely capable of teaching themselves how to think critically and independently enough to overcome the onslaught of highly biased Progressivist attacks on the private sector as the government is held up as the cure to all problems.

Not only are they devoured as individuals by a biased view of history, economics, and of society, but they are all too often left even more defenseless by schools that deliver them into adulthood unable to read, write, and perform basic math skills.  These government-run and controlled schools are making adult dependents, which really means they are producing people who will always be children.

Daniel Mitchell has written a very good article on the Obama administration backing of public teachers unions at the clear expense of the education of mostly black and totally poor students in the Louisiana voucher program.  Louisiana is a state particularly cursed with a long tradition of awful public schools.  Obama wants to prevent the reform of these terrible schools simply to keep the backing of the powerful public teachers unions.

Dan also gives some interesting links to articles by the always great Thomas Sowell and Walter E. Williams, as well as to articles on how Chile, Sweden, and the Netherlands are using vouchers to reform their school systems.

Daniel Mitchell is an economist and commentator well-worth the read.  He is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and a very good man.

Misdirection on Medicare by Obama Ad

Obama is running an ad now that claims that Romney is going to cut $6000 from seniors Medicare benefits and shows various seniors in the ad.  First of all, Romney is not proposing any cut for anyone 55 years or older.  Second, in the future for those less than 55 years old, should legislation be passed to make Medicare sustainable, it is by no means clear that seniors will lose $6,000 of benefits many years from now.  That number has little credibility.  It is simply pulled from a hat.  But it works to scare people. 

It works to create a division between the young and the elderly. The AARP is quoted by Obama's ad, but this group specializes in inter-generational warfare.  It is at war with the children of the elderly.  The young cannot possibly be taxed heavily enough to continue to pay the costs of Medicare given the demographics of the huge Baby Boomer generation and the too small generations following them, unless changes are made.  The best way to control medical costs is to give individuals a stake in how much those services cost.  Vouchers are the means to do this critical task.  You need them to decide that pointless visits to the doctor are expendable.  You need them to put pressure on medical service providers not to overcharge them.  When government says it will control costs, we know that to be nonsense.

The Democrats refuse to deal with the reality that Medicare is not sustainable, much as they refuse to deal with Social Security's problems or to recognize that several terrorist attacks were just that.  The Republicans are manning up and are willing to make the changes needed to make these programs sustainable.  The pretense-given Democrats are standing by as both Medicare and Social Security are spending more money than they are taking in.  We have switched from a situation in which excess Medicare and Social Security tax revenues were used to fund irresponsible general government spending to one in which general income tax income has to be used to make up the shortfall in Medicare and Social Security expenditures.

Democrats Imprison 1,700 Students

The Democrat Congress just threw 1,700 District of Columbia students back into penal holding pens pretending to be public schools. To be especially cruel, these students had been given a brief experience with a real education in private schools under a voucher program.

The D.C. public school system is a total failure. It is clear that it makes no serious effort at providing D.C. students with an education. It does provide many very poor teachers with cushy union jobs and does not make half of them even enter a classroom. It is also a generous source of money for many suppliers of goods and services. The one thing it is unbelievably good at is spending money. The D.C. school system spends about $24,600 per student (see my post of 20 Apr 08). This is not what they say they spend. They claim amounts in the range of $7,000 to $12,000 per student, usually claiming $8,322 per student. The best private schools in D.C., where Obama's children go for instance, charge about $25,000 per year. Anyone would be offended given the quality of a D.C. public school education if they understood how much D.C. spends on its schools. Especially when the school system is always claiming that if it only had a reasonable amount of money, it would educate the students. They always want more.

Given this fact alone, the voucher program which provides $7500 per year to a D.C. student from a poor family to attend a private school is a huge money-saver for the D.C. taxpayer and the Federal government which gives the D.C. school system so much aid. It also allows a poor D.C. student to actually get an education and to have the options in life that come with an education. But, our Democrat Congress, which so poses as the champion of the poor, has most cruelly sent the formerly lucky 1,700 students back to jail. Let them see the light briefly, then throw them back into the blackest pit.

Why do they do such horrible things? Because the public school teacher's union wants them to and the Democrats owe them hugely for their election support. The students are unimportant. Being elected and put in power is all that is important. These are the Democrat champions of the underdog. Well, in order to be that, they must turn human beings into dogs and they must bury them six feet under in ignorance. The Democrats want to sustain the union teachers who do not teach and to create the underdogs they can pretend to champion!

The Cost of Public Schools

Today I mean the cost in tax dollars to support public schools, not the cost in ethical relativism, ignorance, group think, and propaganda devoured. Andrew Coulson of The Cato Institute did some looking into the numbers for the Washington, D.C. public school system. Through the last couple of years I have seen the cost per student given commonly in the range of $9,000 to $12,000 something. He states that the most commonly cited figure is $8,322 per student now. Why do these numbers vary so much? Well, it turns out that it is because it all depends on how much the school system decides to hide from the public.

Coulson found that for K through 12 in 2007-2008, the local operating budget is $831 million, the capital budget is $218 million, federal funding is $85.5 million, and the D.C. Council kicks in an additional $81 million. There are 49,422 students, some of whom, on a given day, actually come to school. Divide this number into the sum of the annual funding and the cost per student is found to be about $24,600, which is rather a bit more than $8,322.

I have heard many discussions about how it is difficult for private schools to take on the education of a child for about $8,322 per year, so they could not take over the public school burden of education. But.......the story is clearly very different when you realize that the public schooling cost for a virtual non-education is on par cost-wise with the very elite private school, Sidwell Friends, that Chelsea Clinton attended. Would any sane person actually send their child to the dangerous and dilapidated D.C. public schools rather than an elite private school? No!

It clearly makes much more sense just to provide parents with a scholarship voucher to use on the school of their choice. Sure, the amount on the voucher may be less than $24,600 per year per student, allowing one to save considerable money for the poor beleaguered taxpayers. Florida's McKay Scholarship program provides money for special-needs children and the average scholarship for 2006-2007 was only $7,206. Sure, the cost of living is lower in Florida, but special-needs education is more expensive to deliver than general education. It is clear that private schools are now available to do a better educating job even at a cost of $12,000 to $15,000 per year per student in even the D.C. area. Many new schools would soon arise to meet the need if parents were given such scholarships.

The quality of the education in D.C. schools is indecently poor. This school system is awash in bureaucracy, inefficiency, and out-right corruption. Parents should be allowed to put it out of business or force it to meet the competition. The fantasy that this public education is free and that it even is education, must be challenged. The forces enforcing its monopoly on the education of our young are truly evil. Those forces include egalitarian socialists and the teacher's unions.

Neither is interested in the individual student learning to think for himself.

CA Attacks the Right to Teach Your Children

In California an appellate court has decided that parents do not have a right to teach their children. The case was brought against a home-school family by the teachers union. In California, the ruling has been that private school teachers do not have to be state certified teachers. Many home-schooling families have declared their homes to be private schools. The teachers union brought the case to try to force any home-schooling parents to have state teachers certification. John Stossel, of ABC News, has written a commentary on this here.

Home-schooled children do better in academic tests and in many cases seem to do even better in terms of analytical thinking skills than do the children educated by our teachers union extensions called the public schools. These teachers unions do not like home schooling for several reasons.

• It removes funding from the schools due to the missing child.
• It removes a child from the reach of their propaganda programs, which preach the superiority of socialism over limited government and group identity politics over the rights of the individual.
• The fact that home-schooled children do better in tests than do those schooled by the teaching professionals in public schools is an embarrassment. This embarrassment can be used to further limit the monopoly powers of public schools and to open the doors to more voucher and school-choice programs. It points a finger at the failure of the public schools.