Hurricane Katrina’s Silver Lining: The School Choice, Charter-School Revolution in New Orleans
Filed under: Public Schools Are Un-American, School Choice, Socialist Public Schools, Why Kids Can't Read, Why Public Schools Are Bad
Comment: Finally, one city has realized that the solution to giving our kids a great education is to GET RID OF THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS, and make all schools CHARTER SCHOOLS. Get rid of government and union control of our kid’s education, permanently. Charter schools are almost the best solution for giving our kids the education they deserve. A totally free-market school system would be the best solution. But, turning ALL current public schools into Charter schools is the next-best solution. It seems that Hurricane Katrina did have a silver lining for the children of New Orleans. I congratulate the farsighted parents, educators, and education administration in New Orleans for finally understanding that government-controlled public schools are education poison for their children, and they had to get rid of them in favor of charter schools.
Socialist Public Schools In America
Filed under: Public Schools Are Un-American, Socialist Public Schools
“Free education for all children in government schools.”
- Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
Many parents might think it a bit farfetched to compare our public schools to schools in socialist or communist countries. However, if we look closer, we will see striking similarities between the two systems.
In the former socialist-communist Soviet Union, for example, the government owned all property and all the schools. In America, public schools are also government property, controlled by local government officials. In Soviet Russia, the government forced all parents to send their children to government-controlled schools. In America, compulsory-attendance laws in all fifty states can force parents to send their children to public schools if the parents can’t afford a private school.
The Soviet rulers taxed all their subjects to pay for their schools. Here, all taxpayers pay compulsory school taxes to support public schools, whether or not the homeowner has children or thinks the schools are incompetent. In the Soviet Union, all teachers were government employees, and these officials controlled and managed the schools. In America, teachers, principals, administrators, and school janitors are also government employees, paid, trained, and pensioned through government taxes.
In the Soviet Union, most government employees presumed they had a ‘right’ to a job provided by the state. Public-school employees in America also believe they have an alleged right to their jobs, enforced through tenure laws. In America, it’s very difficult and costly to fire tenured teachers. In communist Russia, competence and working hard didn’t matter very much — the government paid most workers regardless of their performance on the job. In America, public-school teachers’ salaries depend on length of service and civil-service rules, not competence. In communist Russia, the elite ruling class had estates in the countryside while peasants starved. Here, public-school authorities get fat salaries, pensions, and benefits while millions of children get a dismal education.
In communist Russia, government control of food supplies created eighty years of chronic famine. In America, one hundred and fifty years of public schools has created an educational famine. Many public-school children can barely read while the system wastes years of our children’s lives.
Albert Shanker, former President of the American Federation of Teachers, Agreed
Still think the comparison to communist schools is too farfetched? Albert Shanker, late President of the American Federation of Teachers, the second largest teacher’s union, once said: “It’s time to admit that public education operates like a planned economy, a bureaucratic system in which everyone’s role is spelled out in advance and there are few incentives for innovation and productivity. It’s no surprise that our school system doesn’t improve. It more resembles the communist economy than our own market economy.”
Public School Authorities Act Like Socialist Commissars
Finally, schools in some communist countries like China seem to give a better, more disciplined education in the basics of reading, writing, and math than our public schools. International math and reading test-score comparisons often find American kids lagging far behind children from China.
But what values do Chinese communist schools teach their children? Here is another apt comparison between communist schools and our public schools. In both cases, either a central or local government controls the curriculum and the values it chooses to teach its students. The Chinese government can and does indoctrinate all school children with its communist ideology and loyalty to the communist leaders.
Similarly, in our public schools, school authorities control the curriculum and the values they teach our children. In many public schools, values-clarification programs and distorted American history courses in many public schools now indoctrinate our children with anti-traditional American values. In both communist schools and our government-controlled public schools, it is extremely difficult for parents to stop school authorities from teaching what parents consider harmful or immoral values to their children. Question — Do socialist, compulsory, government-controlled public schools belong in America, once the land of the free?
Do Children Have A “Right” To An Education?
Filed under: Education News, How Public Schools Harm Kids, Land Of The Free?, Public School Disaster, Public Schools Are Un-American
By Joel Turtel - NewsWithViews.com
One of the most common arguments that school authorities use to justify public schools is that all children have a “right” to an education. Public-school apologists claim that all children have a right to an education, and that only the existence of a massive, compulsory, government-controlled public-school system can “guarantee” that right.
As I will explain below, the claim that all children have a right to an education ends up hurting the very children it was intended to help. I will therefore ask a seemingly shocking question — do all children have a right to an education? If they do, public-school apologists are correct in assuming that we need government to guarantee that right.
What is an economic right such as the alleged right to an education? A right means that a person has a claim on the rest of society (other Americans) to give him some product or service he wants, regardless of whether he can pay for it or not. For example, if we claimed that everyone has a right to a car, that would mean if someone couldn’t afford a car, government would give that person the money to buy it (the payment might be called a car voucher).
Similarly, if we say that all children have a right to an education, regardless of their parent’s ability to pay tuition, then only government can guarantee this alleged right. Government has to guarantee this right because no private, for-profit school will admit a student if the parents don’t pay tuition (unless the student gets a scholarship). If a private school doesn’t get paid for its services, it soon goes out of business.
Local or state governments can guarantee this alleged right in two basic ways. They can own and operate all the public schools and force all children to attend these schools, or they can give subsidies (vouchers) to parents to pay for tuition in the private school of their choice. Since most school authorities strongly oppose vouchers, that means they support only a government-controlled system of compulsory public schools and school taxes to guarantee children this alleged right to an education.
But government produces nothing by itself. Government gets its money by taxing us. To guarantee this alleged right to a product or service, government tax collectors must therefore take money from one person to give it to another. They must take from Peter to pay Paul, as the saying goes. So, in effect, a person who demands food, housing, or medical care as an alleged right, is really demanding that government tax agents steal money from his neighbor to give him an unearned benefit he didn’t work for.
Education, like housing or medical care, does not grow free in nature. Just as someone must pay doctors, nurses, and hospitals for all the services they provide, someone must also pay for teachers’ salaries, textbooks, janitorial services, and school upkeep. Other than air, nothing that we need is free.
The average public school now gets over $7,500 a year per student, paid from compulsory taxes. To guarantee education as a “right,” local, state, and federal governments must tax all Americans to pay for public schools. All of us are taxed, whether or not we have school-age children or think these schools are worth paying for. So when some parents claim that their children have a right to an education, they are really demanding that their local or state government steal money from their neighbors to pay for their children’s education.
Here’s an analogy that might help clarify this issue. Imagine that your unemployed neighbor comes to you and asks you to lend him money to pay for his children’s education. You reply that, though you sympathize with his problem, your answer is no. He responds by saying that he is poor, points out that you have a big house and a job, and insists that his children have a “right” to an education. You say, “Sorry, my answer is still no because I need my money for my own children’s education.” Suppose that your neighbor then gets real mad, pulls out a gun, puts it to your head, and says, “I asked you nicely. I told you my children need an education. You have a job, and I’m unemployed, so you have a moral duty to give me your money.” Then he clicks back the hammer on the gun.
Does your neighbor have the right to put a gun to your head and steal your money because his children “need” an education? He has no such right. Nor does he, or any number of your neighbors, have the right to rob you by getting government to be their enforcer – by pressuring local governments to take your money through school taxes. Any school system that uses compulsory taxes is a system based on the notion that theft is moral if it’s for a good cause. No goal, not even educating children, justifies legalized theft.
It is only natural that all parents want the best education for their children, but do good intentions justify stealing from your neighbor? A mugger on the street who puts a knife to your throat and demands your money also has good intentions – he wants to make his life better with your money. One of the Ten Commandments says, “Thou shalt not steal.” It does not say, “Thou shalt not steal, except if you need tuition money to educate your child.” Since no one has a right to steal from his neighbor, no one, including children, has a “right” to an education.
Surely we can’t punish innocent children for their parent’s failures? Just because parents are poor or unemployed, why should innocent children suffer and be denied an education? The answer to that question is one that many people find hard to accept, yet it is true – there are no guarantees in life, not for adults or for children. Good intentions to alleviate a problem do not justify hurting other people by stealing from them. Two wrongs do not make a right.
Moreover, if we agree that children have a right to an education because their parents are poor, then shouldn’t they also have a right to food, a bicycle, a nice house in the suburbs, and designer clothes? If poor kids (and all children) have an alleged right to an education, don’t they also have an alleged right to everything else that other kids have whose parents are well-off? Why not then say that anyone, poor, middle-class, or rich who has less money than his neighbor, has the “right” to steal from his neighbor?
Where do we stop if some people can legally steal from others because they claim their kids need this or that?
The answer is, we don’t stop, and we haven’t stopped. That is why our country has turned into a devouring welfare state that is drowning in debt. When I use the word “welfare,” I don’t mean only for the poor. Rich, poor, and middle-class alike in America now claim the right to everything from corporate tax breaks and subsidies, to price supports for farmers, to Medicare, to rent subsidies for unwed mothers. When we let government steal money from taxpayers to give unearned benefits or subsidies to special-interest groups, we open up a Pandora’s box. We become a nation of thieves stealing from each other. Is this what we want America to become?
The current economic crash was caused by marxist-Democrat Senators and Congressmen who believed that all people have a “right” to a home, even people with low-income or bad credit who couldn’t afford the mortgage payments. So the marxists in Congress pushed banks to give loans to everyone, no matter what their income or credit rating was.They then created a system that guaranteed these risky loans through the quasi-government agencies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Because government agencies guaranteed these risky loans, naturally the banks went on a lending binge of sub-prime mortgages. The crash had to come, sooner or later. So this alleged “right” to a home eventually snowballed into the toxic sub-prime mortgage crisis that triggered the economic crash that we’re ALL suffering from.
Now the Obama marxists in Congress are looking to pass the 2000-page “health-care” bill that will destroy our health care system and health-care liberty, because Obama and the Democrat-marxists in Congress believe that all people have a “right” to health care. That’s the underlying driving premise behind this health-care bill. To “guarantee” health care as a “right,” they will now destroy our health-care liberty and the health-care system for the rest of us.
It is true that a free market does not, and cannot guarantee that all children have enough to eat or live in a comfortable house. Likewise, a free-market education system in which all parents have to pay for their children’s education obviously can’t guarantee a quality education for every child.
However, government-controlled public schools also can’t guarantee that every child gets a quality education. These failed schools can barely teach our children to read. Also, neither system can make guarantees because there are no guarantees in life, and because each child’s abilities, personality, and family background are so different that such guarantees are impossible. The real question, then, is not which system is perfect, but which system is more likely to give the vast majority of children a quality education that most parents could afford?
Public schools fail and betray millions of children, year after year. The only “right” the public-school system gives to school children is the right to suffer through a mind-numbing, third-rate education for twelve years.
In contrast, the free-market, while not perfect, gives us all the wondrous goods and services we buy every day, such as cars, fresh food, computers, refrigerators, and televisions. The superbly efficient and competitive free market gives us all these marvelous products at prices that most people can afford. Even the poorest American families today have a car, refrigerator, and sometimes two televisions in their homes. If we want to discover which system would give the vast majority of children a quality education at reasonable prices, I think we have the answer – the free market, hands down.
We therefore don’t need a failed public-school system to enforce an alleged right to an education, when there is no such right in the first place. Each parent should be responsible for paying for their own children’s education, just as they pay for their children’s food or clothing.
Finally, public-school apologists use this alleged right to an education to justify keeping the public-school dinosaur alive, in spite of these schools’ never-ending failure. Many public-school apologists who claim that children have a right to an education do so out of good intentions. They want to give all children a chance to get a decent education. But good intentions mean worse than nothing if they lead to dismal consequences. This alleged right to an education lets government bureaucrats have tyrannical control over our children’s minds and future.
The “right” to an education requires a massive government-controlled public-school system to enforce that right. But it is this same public-school system that cripples the education and lives of millions of children. So, ironically, the alleged right to an education is the worst thing we can offer our children.
Most low-income families don’t need government education handouts anymore in the form of allegedly “free” public schools. Parents today can buy quality, low-cost food in a competitive, free-market food industry full of grocery stores and supermarkets. In the same way, parents today can give their kids a quality education using low-cost Internet private schools and homeschooling.
Only when we reject the notion that all children have a “right” to an education will we get government out of the education business, permanently. Only a fiercely-competitive free-market education system can give kids the quality, low-cost education they deserve.
Public Schools, Public Prisons
Filed under: How Public Schools Harm Kids, Public Schools Are Un-American, Why Public Schools Are Bad
Why have we put our children into education prisons called public schools? What crimes have they committed? Why do we condemn almost 45 million innocent children to this punishment? Do I exaggerate by calling these schools “prisons?” Well, let’s compare prisons and public schools.
What are prisons? They are places where people are locked up against their will for crimes they have committed.
What is life like for a prisoner? The warden and prison guards, in effect, take away the prisoner’s life and freedom. They force a prisoner to live in a small cell he doesn’t want to live in, eat food he may hate, work at a job he detests, associate with other prisoners who may be dangerous, and remove him from everyone and everything he loved in the outside world when he was free.
Like prisons, public schools impose their will by force, by compulsion. Local governments force parents to send their children to public schools just as the police drag convicted criminals into prison (even though many parents are not aware of this and voluntarily send their kids to these schools). A parent can be convicted of alleged child abuse and sent to prison if she disobeys the school authority’s order to send her child to the local public school.
Local governments then force parents to pay school taxes for these education prisons. If they don’t pay these taxes, their local government will foreclose on their home and throw them out on the street.
School authorities force children to stay in school until they are 16 years old or graduate high school (these age limits vary by state). In effect, most children get a 10-year education prison sentence if they start school at age six.
School authorities force millions of children to sit in boxes called classrooms with 20 other children-inmates for six to eight hours a day, five days a week, for up to ten years. The children must obey the adult education wardens (teachers and principals), who they may fear or dislike. They must study subjects they may hate or that bore them to death. They must associate only with other children their same age who may be bullies, violent, or emotionally disturbed. They must do homework and study for tests they must pass or be left back in school.
The children are removed from their loving parents and put under the control of teacher-wardens who may not love them, care for them, or simply even have the time to pay attention to them. They are stopped from being free-spirited child. They are told to keep quiet. They are told to obey the rules. They are told to march from classroom cell to classroom cell every 50 minutes to study different subjects that may mean nothing to them.
Parents, if you don’t think this is harsh punishment for your innocent child, ask yourself this. When your spouse pressures you to attend some event you hate, whether a ballet, lecture, or football game, how do you feel? After sitting at that event for only an hour, how do you feel? You are probably angry, irritated, and frustrated. You squirm in your seat or doze off. You can’t wait to get out of there. You can’t wait to get back to your life and doing the things you love to do.
Well, millions of kids, and probably your child, must sit through this agony of boredom or frustration for 6 to 8 hours a day for 10 years in public-school classrooms. Yet, to repeat, what crimes have your children committed to warrant this horrible punishment?
In fact, they have committed no crime whatsoever. They are simply innocent victims of local governments and public-school authorities who think they own your children, who think they have the right to put your children into education prisons for 10 years for “their own good.”
Parents, if a rogue cop came and took your child to prison for no reason whatsoever, except for saying it would be for your child’s “own good,” would you not fight to the death to stop him? So why do you let school authorities take your innocent children and punish them for ten years?
Parents, if you thought you had no choice, you are wrong. Happily, you can homeschool your child or give your child a fun, quality, rewarding, low-cost education with Internet private schools. You have many education options. If your child hates school, listen to him or her. Don’t let school authorities put your child in a public-school prison for ten years. You have a choice, and your child’s life is at stake.
You can find out about all your education options in Joel Turtel’s book, “Public Schools, Public Menace.” Please take advantage of the Resources in this book, for your children’s sake.
America’s Public-School System — Brutal and Spartan
Filed under: Public School Disaster, Public Schools Are Un-American
The public school system in America has become a dismal failure. But education in many other times and cultures has been quite successful. The ancient Greeks, whose civilization was at its height around 550 B.C., founded Western civilization as we know it. The Athenian Greeks invented or perfected logic, drama, science, philosophy, astronomy, mathematics, literature, and much more. Yet ancient Greece had no compulsory schools.
Other than requiring two years of military training for young men that began at age eighteen, Athens let parents educate their children as they saw fit. Parents either taught their children at home or sent them to voluntary schools where teachers and philosophers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle gave lectures to all who wanted to learn. These great teacher-philosophers did not need a license to teach, nor did they have tenure. The ancient Athenians had a free-market education system. The thought of compulsory, state-run schools and compulsory teacher licensing would have been repulsive to them. The Athenians respected a parent’s natural right to direct the education of their children.
In contrast, Sparta, Athens’s mortal enemy, created the first truly state-run, compulsory education system on record. Individual Spartans lived and died for the State, and had to serve the State from birth until sixty years of age. Their society was a brutal military dictatorship in which male children literally belonged to the city rulers, not to their parents.
The Spartan military government took boys from their homes and parents at the age of seven and forced them to live in military-style barracks for the rest of their lives. Spartan men were life-long soldiers whose highest duty was to obey the commands of their leaders. It is no coincidence that Sparta had compulsory, state-run education. If a society believes that children belong not to parents, but to the State, then the State must control children’s education by compulsion.
Are our public schools any different than the brutal Spartan society in the way they treat parents and children? Today, school compulsory-attendance laws force parents to hand over their children to government employees called teachers for eight to twelve years. In effect, our local and state governments claim that they, like the Spartans, own our children’s minds and bodies for twelve years. Parents who refuse to hand over their children to the public schools can be, and have been, locked in jail for disobeying the compulsory-attendance laws.
In this respect, our public schools today are just as brutal as the Spartans. The difference is only in degree. Where the Spartans stole children from their parents to serve a lifetime in their military, our local governments create laws that let them, in effect, legally kidnap our children to serve twelve years in their education boot camps called public schools. The brutality of the principal is the same.
Both the Spartans and our public-school officials think they own our children, and have utter contempt for parents’ rights.
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