By Bill Woodruff
Ballot initiatives for education usually pass because so many people believe that more money equals better education.
If this were true then our schools would have been steadily improving over several decades, instead of declining. We have gone from first to 26th internationally.
California has fared even worse. During this time spending has more than doubled.
To oppose an initiative for schools is equated with being opposed to teachers or students. Any mention of changing our educational system causes a knee-jerk reaction. It”s America”s sacred cow. I like beef and am ready for a good barbecue.
The biggest problem with our education system is that it”s a government monopoly with increasing centralization, funded by the coercive power of taxation.
What I find disconcerting is that the same people who denounce the power of large corporations funded by voluntary sales advocate a larger bureaucracy for schools.
When a corporation such as Standard Oil or Microsoft dominates an industry, the government prosecutes them for being a monopoly. They argue that it is unfair competition and bad for the consumer.
Why then, when the government has the monopoly, do they argue that their monopoly is best for the students?
Competition keeps the free enterprise system healthy and freedom of choice is essential for a free society. It”s time that we apply the same principle to the principals.
In Milton Friedman”s book, “Free to Choose,” he proposed a voucher system for education. The parents get the choice of which public or private school they want their child to attend, and the tax voucher goes with the student to that school.
If you”re happy with your present school, keep it, but don”t deny others their right to choose.
Only people rich enough to pay taxes for schools and for private school tuition are free to choose now. Our current system punishes everyone, but mostly the poor and middle-class.
The voucher system has been very successful both economically and for the quality of education where it has been tried.
Students and parents who use it, support it. The opposition comes from the education monopoly that does not want competition. When a bad private school fails it goes out of business. When a government entity fails it gets a budget increase.
Since the Department of Education started in 1979, their budget has gone up to about $78 billion annually, with the average paper-pusher in Washington D.C. getting paid more than $100,000 a year. There are thousands of them. This is money that is not going to pay teachers now, so why send it to Washington D.C. in the first place? It”s a lot easier to create a useless bureaucracy then to get rid of one.
Do you still think that education is underfunded? The problem is that our taxes go to a bloated, counterproductive bureaucracy, not to educating students. Albert Einstein said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. How long will we continue to throw money at a broken system and expect it to get better?
It costs almost twice as much per student in public school as private school. So why not let the parents choose to take their voucher to any public or private school they choose, and let the best school win? The students, teachers, parents and taxpayers will all benefit; bureaucrats, not so much.
I”m all for teachers. They deserve a good income and a good working environment. Teachers and especially students deserve a better system.
A vital education system is crucial if our country is to compete and prosper in the future. The federal government should not be involved in education at all. Even the state bureaucracies are too large. It should be managed at the county level. The closer the money and the decisions are to the parents, the better.
This is not a simplistic cure-all, but a step in the right direction. Bureaucrats are poor innovators, but there are some promising new teaching methods that I believe will be adopted in a free market educational system.
Bill Woodruff is a longtime Lake County resident and former business owner.
