Maroon Weekly

By Tony Listi

Government-administered education has been an utter disaster. Children don’t learn the skills they need to succeed in the global economy. Even worse, children are indoctrinated to embrace lies, atheism/agnosticism, socialism and sexual perversity. Additionally, too many of our public schools are not safe, plagued by violence and disorder.

The system is broken. But we can increase the safety and the quality of both the practical and moral education of American school children by empowering parents, not education bureaucrats and teachers unions, to choose which schools their children and tax dollars go to.

One doesn’t need international test results to know that the education system is failing our kids. One need only to ask parents, college admission offices and employers. But in case there was any doubt, in 2007 the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) the United States ranked 17 out of 30 participating countries in math and science. The next generation of Americans will not be able to compete for high-paying jobs without competency in these areas.

Yet when one realizes that leftists see education primarily, if not merely, as a tool to fill young minds with politically correct trash, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that American children are falling way behind academically. Thanks to our PC public schools, children are too busy writing about their feelings in journals to actually learn math, science, grammar and writing composition.

While violence and crime overall in schools has been declining relative to the 1990s, many schools, especially in inner-cities, are not very safe. The violence on the streets does not stop at the edge of school grounds.
Because roughly three-quarters of all K-12 students are assigned to a public school, parents have little hope of ensuring their children receive a quality, safe education. No wonder so many parents are turning to homeschooling to protect the well-being and future of their kids.

Many parents make heavy financial sacrifices to put their children in private or parochial schools where the quality of education is higher in many respects. But why should parents be punished financially for trying to send their kid to such schools? Why should they be forced to pay for a failed system they are trying to escape? Why should they be coerced into paying twice for their child’s education (once for taxes and once for private tuition)?
We don’t need “change we can believe in”; we need change that works. The solution to underperforming and unsafe schools is parental choice of school, whether public or private or neither. No one will ever care about the educational well-being of children more than their own parents. No one is a better judge of the quality of a child’s education than his or her own parents.

Funding for education should be tied to each individual student and to parental choice. Schools, both public and private, should be forced to compete for parental approval and thus the funds that come with each student who enrolls in the school. Inferior schools wouldn’t receive as much funding while superior schools would steadily increase their funding and be able to expand. Parents who want to homeschool their children should receive at least a partial refund or tax credit.

Public funding of religiously-affiliated schools violates no one’s rights because no student would be forced to attend such a school. If parents want to send their children to a school that doesn’t mention God, prayer or the Bible, then they will have the choice to do so.

Moreover, school choice works wherever it has been tried: Sweden, Washington, D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program, Florida’s McKay Scholarship Program and many other American cities. At least a dozen states have school choice programs in place now. It is even receiving bipartisan support in several states as black and Hispanic parents, who have the most to gain, are seeing the great benefits of school choice and demanding it from their representatives.
In addition to benefitting children, this system would benefit the political culture of the country. Government-run schools are the primary, if not the only, reason that leftist political philosophy and public policy survive; otherwise, a free market in education would have weeded them out. No wonder they are so eager to preserve the miserable status quo.