Killing public education

2004.03.28— Government | Education | by Derek Jensen

George W Bush hates public education. He despises it in his soul and he wants to kill it. Unsure? Let's look at his actions.

Corporate welfare for conservative education

Bush is giving federal dollars to private organizations that promote home schooling and private schools.

Eugene Hickok was a leader in the movement to improve public education by killing it. Bush plucked him out of that movement and made him undersecretary of the Department of Education. Hickok had proven himself a radical in Pennsylvania under Bush friend and one-time governor Tom Ridge with a series of programs that promoted private and cyber schools over public schools, including some to require teachers to have a college degree in the subject they teach.

That's not a bad idea... except that it would invalidate almost all teacher's certificates today. Most teachers have degrees in education, not math, science, and English. Send public school teachers back to school for more education in subjects they've been teaching for years would, well, kill the public education system.

According to Now with Bill Moyers, the Department of Education has $77 million it can give to anyone it wants to improve education. It has chosen to give that money almost exclusively to private organizations that promote private schooling (half of it to Reagan friend Bill Bennett's K12). Why would public money go to organizations that promote alternatives to public education? The Bush administration says that it wants to promote choice—not the abortion kind of choice, of course, but choice for parents who want to abandon weak public schools and send their kids to private academies or keep them at home and teach them themselves (without a degree in math, science, or English, of course).

No Child Left Behind

Bush's No Child Left Behind Act allows kids from poor schools to transfer to successful ones. Result: the successful schools become overwhelmed and begin failing. Worse, those transfers occur at the expense of the school district, ensuring that bad schools get less and less money. Children who fail the (yet another) standardized tests are held back for remediation despite little evidence that it helps them later. (Ironically, this ensures that more children get "left behind" than before.) Cyber schools have proven popular in places but unsuccessful anywhere, especially... Pennsylvania.

Part of the problem is that it's underfunded. It makes big demands of the states without federal money to accomplish them; and even conservative states are balking. Bush gave only $772 million to schools to help them implement the programs and meet the new demands. And next year, Bush only wants $391 million—that's only a few dollars per schoolchild nationwide.

Private school vouchers

What the president ultimately wants is a large-scale program to fund vouchers for private education. He wants every American family to have the option of sending their children to private school at minimal cost. With that option, who would choose public school? (Answer: poor urban parents Bush doesn't care about.)

That would gut public schools, of course, and essentially kill them. The government would become a single-payer for a new kind of nationalized, federally-controlled, education system. In this system, state and federal tax dollars fund vouchers to off-set most of the cost of sending children to private school. Small, hollowed-out versions of public schools would still exist, but only for the poorest of families.

Most parents would supplement the vouchers with their own money to send their kids to private schools—many of them run by religious organizations, which is the real goal. There, conservatives can teach any curriculum they want, have classroom prayers if they like, and keep out undesirables like poor urban kids who might create gangs (and Jews; let them go to their own faith-based schools).

The alternative

Does our public education system need help? Yes. It needs to be funded partly with federal dollars not tied to property taxes, so poor kids from poor neighborhoods don't have to go to poor schools. Courts should make better use of reform schools for violent kids. Public school should be a haven from gangs and poverty, not for them.

But privatizing education would lead to the same kinds limited opportunities, discrimination, and exploding costs associated with college education. As a result, the country will have two kinds of "public" schooling: weak, impoverished, inner city and rural public schools and excellent, expensive, suburban and urban private schools.

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