Stupid Schools: Public Education is Failing our Children

With a perverse wedding of an entrenched union and an innovation-killing monopoly, American public education is a marriage made in hell. This is why our public education system is failing students all across our nation. The two greatest problems facing our educational leviathan are a payment plan which rewards mediocrity while prohibiting meritocracy, and an outdated, one-size-fits-all educational philosophy which fails to prepare American students for the modern world. The best solution to these problems is an end to the government monopoly on public education.

In town meetings, NEA rallies, and school newsletters across our nation, a dire fallacy is being promoted: the great lie that our public school systems are under funded. This simply isn’t true. In 2004 over 536 billion dollars was spent on public education, a figure far more than in countries which routinely trump America on international tests. With an average national wage of $30.91 an hour, public school teachers make a higher hourly salary than chemists, computer programmers, and nurses. The problems lies not in funding, but in a Byzantine union system and the incredibly illogical salary formulas which it has created. Membership in the American Federation of Teachers is mandatory for almost all public school educators. This organization and its hired lobbyists have created a payment system where teachers are paid not based on results, but simply on the amount of time they’ve been teaching. Motivation for excellence is nonexistent when it is not rewarded. In private industry, salaries are based on results and workers who cannot perform are terminated. Results aren’t taken into account in education. a free-market, good teachers would receive a salary increase. If parents had school choice, they would demand the most skilled teacher for their student. Demand for the good teachers would increase their salaries. In the government monopoly though, teachers are paid the same amount whether they are excellent or dreadful. Onerous procedures turn firing an incompetent teacher into a two year legal battle. This leaves most principals unwilling to try to discipline even the most flagrantly maladroit of educators. Mediocrity is rewarded simply because excellence is ignored. A system which disregards merit to pay equally has been proven to fail again and again. This system is called communism.

Monopolies don’t innovate, and the public school system is no different. Most public school’s start in September and end in June. This is a relic of America’s agrarian roots. In the early 1800s, children needed the summer off to harvest the crops. Very few Americans are farmers, and many nations have year-round schooling. American public schools however have remained impervious to change, with the obsolete and outdated schedule dominating. With this resistance to change, it’s no surprise that public education is failing our students.

Picture the printer aisle at Best Buy. The consumer has an almost infinite number of choices. Printers with scanners, printers with clocks, wireless printers, printers with forty-eight hour batteries, and many other kinds of printers are all available. Best Buy doesn’t offer these myriad options because it likes the consumer. Best Buy offers choices because it needs the consumer’s money. The miracle of competition offers a multitude of choices in almost every aspect of life. From shopping at the supermarket to buying a new automobile, choice is all around the American consumer. This is a miracle unknown in the government monopoly of public schooling, where enrollment in schools is based on an arbitrary district line. With the stroke of a pen, bureaucrats can doom a child to a failing school or deign to send him to a better school. If parents are unsatisfied with the school, it’s their problem. If the school is terrible, and fails to provide an education, the government’s attitude is simply arrogant disinterest. With this system, it is no wonder American students finish in the bottom fifty percent in international math surveys.

From Microsoft Windows, to VEB Sachsenring, to the defunct Ma Bell, monopolies have proven time and time again to fail their customers. Public schooling is no different. While it’s true that parents do have an effect on their student’s educational success, many good parents are being forced to send their children to failing schools. When the government monopoly on public education is broken, parents will have as much choice in their schools as they do in their printers. The best way to give them this choice while maintaining education for all is a voucher system. Vouchers will attach the money to the student rather than the school and give parents choice. With vouchers, private schools would no longer be the domain of the wealthy. There could be schools with uniforms, schools with nontraditional hours, technology schools, schools that graduate students at sixteen and alternate high schools that cater to troubled students. With choice will come student success, because a free-choice public school system will force schools to perform, or lose money. Rather than being stuck in a failing school district, parents with school choice can take their business elsewhere.

America has not always suffered under a public school monopoly. Only in the 1830s did a campaign for centralized, socialistic public education begin. Horace Mann thought that education would eradicate poverty and establish a virtual utopia. He claimed that with public education “over nine-tenths of the penal code will be antiquated.“ These impossible dreams were not realized, and sugarplum delusions of perfection became stood in the way of realistic achievement. Americans only believe in this failed educational system because they know no better. Imagine if the government forced people to get their food the same way students get educated. People would pay heavy taxes and then be assigned to one restaurant where they’d be forced to eat every meal no better how abysmal the food is. This wouldn’t be tolerated, and neither should the monopolistic and socialized public school system.