| abstract
| - America’s system of public education has earned an extraordinary distinction in comparison to the public schools of our international competitors. Only in America do we commit such egregious malpractice against our children that they actually get dumber every year they remain trapped in the public school monopoly. Public schools suffer the same defense as members of Congress: “They’re all terrible except for mine.” As I candidate for Congress and a product of American public schools, I feel I have an obligation to speak truth to power. Your public school and your Congressional representative are – statistically speaking – probably both dismal failures, and for the same reason: neither is truly accountable to constituents. The similarities are striking, if not terrifying:
* Political forces largely outside the control of citizens and voters establish districts that rarely have anything to do with serving the public, but frequently have everything to do with maintaining monopoly power.
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* In Congress, members gerrymander their districts to insulate themselves from competitive elections.
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* In public schools, bureaucrats set neighborhood school boundaries that prevent competition among schools.
* We measure inputs rather than results.
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* In Congress, increasing budgets are the most important measure of a program’s power and success, regardless of whether the program accomplishes anything, whether it’s necessary, or even if the program is counterproductive.
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* In public schools, supporters equate greater quality with increased funding, despite the absence of any statistical correlation between increased budgets and improved outcomes.
* Failure results in more funding.
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* In Congress, failed programs are never the result of bad ideas, implementation, or employees. They are always the result of too little funding.
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* In public schools, illiteracy, dropouts, declining test scores, and the inability to match wits with our international peers are never the result of bad curricula, bad teachers, or bad instruction methods. They are always the result of bad parents, unreasonable expectations, and too little funding.
* The leaders follow fads without any evidence that their path will take them where they want to go.
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* In Congress, legislators and committees use the rule of magpies – they find something bright and then they land on it. This is why Congress holds endless hearings about issues that belong on “Entertainment Tonight” and “Dateline” rather than about issues that really matter to citizens.
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* In public schools, the curriculum is so dedicated to political correctness, new math, and whole language learning that it has escaped the attention of professional educators that our children do not know whether the phrase, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” comes from Thomas Jefferson or Karl Marx; how to read a food label, make change, or balance a checkbook; and, how to read, spell, and write.
* Our best and brightest flee with alarming speed and regularity.
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* In Congress, voters commonly complain that they rarely have the opportunity to choose among candidates that excite or enthuse them.
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* In public schools, teachers with the highest ratings for generating positive educational outcomes among their students rarely work more than five years before leaving the field entirely.
* When we are unsatisfied with the outcomes, we have few alternatives and very little recourse.
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* In Congress, because of gerrymandered voting districts, earmarking, and the financial and promotional advantages of incumbency, lawmakers are virtually guaranteed re-election.
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* In public schools, our only option is to move our children to private schools, at our own expense, because parents have virtually no influence over institutions that serve bureaucrats, politicians, and unions rather than students. To add insult to injury, even if we can afford private school tuition, we still have to pay property taxes for a service we found so dissatisfying that we abandoned it. I believe that universal public education is essential. Universal public education is essential for developing engaged citizens, critical thinkers, and an advanced economy. It’s an investment in our children, our country, and our future. But, like any investment, we can make wise or poor decisions about where to allocate our resources. Today, and for a generation or more, we make very poor decisions. This is not unusual in a socialized system – a system in which public servants allocate investments on behalf of a public they supposedly represent. In reality, the central planners who control education investments respond to politics rather than the needs of our children. The reason is simple and understandable: the public education system survives on the largesse of a political system, rather than on the dollars and needs of its customers. The bureaucrats in the Federal and state departments of education are as hopelessly out of touch as the bureaucrats who tried to centrally plan the economies of the failed communist countries. Without any information about which outcomes are actually relevant, they rely on the only information they have – how much money they spend. The Federal government made an effort at remedying this bizarre situation with mandatory testing in the tragic “No Child Left Behind” law. Unfortunately, NCLB allows each state to decide how to conduct that testing. The result is entirely predictable: state political and education leaders manipulate the tests and their definition of “passing grades” to comply with the Federal mandates and secure the Federal funding. So, rather than finding out whether our children are learning anything, we find out how bureaucrats have to adjust the “passing grade” each year to make sure that it reflects “adequate yearly progress.” The solution to this Kafkaesque comedy of manners is simple, radical, and painfully controversial: allow parents and children decide which school they want to attend. Only by allowing this kind of choice – using the public funds we already allocate to universal education to permit families to choose the right school, the right teachers, the right instruction method, and the right curriculum – will we be able to convey to schools the infinite range of variables necessary to make wise investments. In the same way that entrepreneurs strive to build better mousetraps, to deliver better products at lower costs, to respond to the unique demands of 300 million Americans – entrepreneurs will respond to educational choice with a veritable mall of choices that meet the needs of the real consumers of universal public education. Putting more money into a system that doesn’t work will not make the system work. The incentives to perform in today’s public education system are set by people who have an interest in securing more power and more money, and the people responding to those incentives are accountable to the politicians and bureaucrats who set them. Only educational choice will make schools accountable to the constituents who matter – our children.
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