Having dissected public-school apologists’ most common excuses, let us now ask a seemingly simple question — why do they need all these excuses in the first place? If you hire a roofing contractor to fix the roof on your house, and he does a good job, does he make excuses? No. He lets his work do the talking for him. You show your appreciation for a job well done by paying him, recommending him to your friends, and using him again in the future. You become a loyal customer because he proved he is competent, trustworthy, and gave you your money’s worth.
On the other hand, an incompetent, dishonest, or disreputable roofer who leaves holes in your roof, will make excuses. He makes excuses because he wants you to pay him, even though he botched the job. He makes excuses to try to fool you into paying him, even though he doesn’t deserve your money.
This contractor, like most people, also has to justify himself in his own eyes. He doesn’t like to think of himself as dishonest, incompetent, or a bad person — that would wound his self-image. So he rationalizes to himself, and makes excuses to you why his work isn’t so bad. He might tell you that he’s the expert on roofing, that you don’t know good roofing work when you see it, or that no roofer could do a better job.
If the roofer does a lousy job for all his customers, and keeps giving excuses, what happens? In a free market, where you have dozens of other roofers to choose from, you will fire this roofer and look for a better one. So will his other customers, and soon he will be out of business.
Just like our incompetent roofer, public-school authorities need to invent a constant stream of excuses. What do theses excuses accomplish?
1. Personal justification — Every public-school employee believes he is a good person, and most of them are. School employees do not want to believe or admit to themselves that they work for a school system that continually betrays millions of innocent children. These excuses let them justify themselves and the system in their own eyes.
2. Justify their privileged position — Public-school employees need excuses to justify why they have a unique, privileged position in the work world. Most employees in the real world can be fired if they are incompetent. Most companies that do shoddy work can and do go out of business. Few workers in the real world have job guarantees like tenured school employees. Few workers get the fat benefits and pensions that public-school teachers, principals, and administrators do, especially for mediocre or incompetent work. Teachers who work in private kindergartens, grammar or secondary schools, and colleges do not have these same benefits or job guarantees. So public-school employees have to pretend they are somehow unique. They have to pretend they deserve their privileged position. Hence the excuses and self-delusion.
3. Fear of parents — If public-school employees don’t make these elaborate excuses, they are afraid of open rebellion by parents. Already, almost a million parents are voting with their feet by home-schooling their children. Every year, thousands more parents give up in disgust with their local public school, and join the ranks of home-schoolers. Public-school authorities see this as a frightening and dangerous trend. As a result, they need a constant stream of excuses to stem the flow and convince parents to keep their children in public school.
4. To induce guilt — School authorities invent excuses to make parents feel guilty if they take their kids out of public school. No one likes to feel they are a bad person, that they support policies that harm children. Americans are a kind, wonderful, generous people. Public-school apologists play on our good nature. They keep telling scare-stories about how school choice would hurt the children, destroy the public schools, leave minority children behind, and bring back segregated schools. Guilt is a powerful weapon. These excuses are a guilt-trip sword, aimed squarely at parents’ hearts.
5. Loss of funding — Every time a parent takes her child out of public school, the school loses an average of $7500 a year in tax money. If the child was in a special education class, the school loses almost $16,000 a year (on average). When schools lose tax money, they lose power and control. If enough parents quit the public schools, many teachers might be fired because the schools would need fewer teachers. Hence the endless list of excuses to stop the loss of tax dollars and threat to teachers’ jobs.
6. Fear of legislators — If enough parents or parent organizations complain to local or state legislators about bad public schools, legislators may (a) reduce funding to the schools and education programs, (b) pass new laws that require merit pay, accountability, and teacher-competence testing, (c) require teachers to know their subject as a prerequisite for a license, (d ) eliminate tenure rules that guarantee jobs, (e) pass new laws or repeal old ones to make home-schooling easier for parents, and (f) pass new laws that require schools to prove their competence with standardized tests, or lose funding. School authorities want to avoid such legislative punishments. Hence the frantic excuses to keep politicians at bay.
7. Greed — If school authorities fool parents and legislators with their excuses, they then feel safe to demand higher teacher salaries and fatter benefits and pensions. Considering the fact that most public schools continually fail our children and give them a third-rate education, school-employee salaries and benefits should be lowered, not raised. Parents should get value for their hard-earned tax dollars. These excuses fool parents into thinking that public schools do a good job and school employees deserve their salaries and benefits.
School authorities constantly repeat these excuses to make parents doubt their own judgment and common sense, justify the continued existence of failed public schools, and fool or appease parents and legislators who want real school choice. Public-school apologists seem to believe that if they repeat these excuses long enough and loud enough, parents and legislators will accept them. It’s the big-lie technique.
Parents who want quality education for their children cannot depend on a public-school system whose only real achievement is an endless list of excuses why it can’t educate their children. Instead, parents should seriously consider leaving this system behind and finding education alternatives for their children, such as low-cost Internet private schools or homeschooling.
Tags: excuses, public school
