America's education problem

There's a problem with education in this country. America falls farther and farther behind the rest of the world in standardized international tests, even falling behind some countries that were recently considered third-world countries (Poland, the Czech Republic) in math and science. Surveys indicate that all too many recent high school graduates are ignorant of history as well. Why is America doing so much worse at educating its youth than it used to do, when it is spending so much more on education? Quite simply, those in charge of such things tolerate incompetence, especially at schools in poor neighborhoods. The same studies that show America falling behind other countries in education also show that the problem is worst in America's poorest neighborhoods, and that middle class and wealthy neighborhoods produce far better results. The per-student spending is not lower in these areas; in fact, if the District of Columbia (the capital) were a state, it would rank 51st in education, even though its per-student public school funding is higher than any state's average. It has small class sizes, too, not even counting the sky-high truancy rate. So why aren't the students who are actually there getting a top-notch education? Incompetent teachers, low expectations for the students, grade inflation, among other reasons. It's the same in poor, urban school districts across the country.

What caused all of this? Well, it happened over time, as school districts became more and more bureaucratic, and the schools tended to attract teachers who were sympathetic to bureaucracy and government control, and they formed powerful unions to resist implementations of standards. In middle and upper class neighborhoods, these ill effects were alleviated by the participation of parents in their children's education. With so much more single parenthood and, sadly, apathy in the poorer neighborhoods, those parents who cared about their children's education and had the time to do something about it were few enough that those schools had almost no resistance to stop them going the way of every other unchecked government program - down the toilet.

Now, there's an alliance between the teachers' unions and the Democratic party to perpetuate the status quo - lousy schools in poor neighborhoods, teachers still paid more than most people of the same level of education, most poor public high school students still ignorant of history and math (and almost all high school students lacking the ability to think critically or logically). Whenever the topic of education problems comes up, almost any Democrat (officeholder or voter) will try to make the issue about spending more federal money or shrinking class sizes or equipping classrooms with computers. But really, all that's needed is more accountability, competition, and incentives - in other words, the free market. It doesn't even have to be the drastic change you might think. It just takes vouchers - vouchers have been proven not only to improve the overall education of a given school district, or even a whole state, but also to improve the performance of the public schools that are losing funds! This quite thoroughly debunks the argument that vouchers (via exclusive private schools) rob public schools of their most gifted students and that the worst students stay at public schools to suffer even worse education than before. The competition for funding creates an incentive for schools to do what they're supposed to, when there's no incentive for effective (and potentially unpleasant) action otherwise.

So why are Democrats so resistant to this idea? The answer is really ugly, but it needs to be revealed: they need ignorant voters for their constituency. And they can disguise the ignorance of their constituency with a fraudulent high school diploma; they can hide the impact their destructive policies have on minorities with "affirmative action" (a policy that treats minority applicants as much more qualified than they really are when they try to get into a public university or get a government job). All of this has the potential to devastate the lives of the minorities and the poor directly involved, but that is of little concern to power-hungry politicians.

I am by no means trying to imply that Republicans are innocent in all of this. Republicans who gave up fighting for vouchers are either duplicitous or cowardly, and that includes the president. As on immigration control and cutting government spending, he betrayed the values of those who voted for him, to the detriment of the whole country.

SRS