We have come to a point at which our large debate and witch hunt has thrown off some interesting sparks. The insistence of Republicans to dump the Department of Education is the latest tangent. I think we've reached the point at which verbatim quotes and excerpts from congressional deliberations and statements to the press are necessary, if not actual policy statements. I have none but will continue to layout this simple argument:
On the Department of Education, I can assure you, for what it's worth, that Republican antipathy to the teacher's union is the greatest source of friction. Republicans don't like unions. Plain and simple.
Republicans and conservatives prefer private action. We believe that it is swift, competitive and less apt to compromise. Our best schools are private schools. Yet public schools spend as much per capita as private schools. The difference are the work rules. The fundamental Republican argument is that union collective bargaining and work rules create an insurmountable barrier to the changes required to make public schools function as well as their private competitors. Most specifically, the hiring and firing of teachers and administrators.
If you follow the real activities of the Republicans, rather than pursue the racial conspiracy theory you are bound to face the question of vouchers. The idea behind them was simple, if you can't change the public school system, allow more kids trapped in that inferior system escape to private schools with the same tax money.
The second front in this war against inferior public idea of charter schools was originated to prove that excellence could be achieved if exceptions to union controlled processes were granted.
I was involved in these debates and can remember a time, specifically when the LA Unified School District would not allow kids in poor neighborhoods to go to public schools in more affluent areas, even though they were under the same school administration. I believe that it was Republican pressure that changed that rule.
It has also always made sense to me that busing kids in poor neighborhoods to better schools elsewhere was a foolish idea, and that one should bus teachers instead. But the city of Charlotte, NC has probably the most notorious system in the country, that for the sake of racial balance, has its public school children bussed all over the city. Under the regime in Charlotte, parents have little idea and no control over which school their children will attend. It's a startling experiment. But this is the kind of remedy imposed because the union rules forbid the busing of teachers and the bureaucratic system of funding school improvements is byzantine. It is no wonder that charter schools are successful ones.
NCLB is the third prong in the attack against public schools resistance to change. It essentially makes schools accountable to a standard and creates a situation in which a failing school can lose its charter, in which case the sclerotic standards and practices of the teachers' union can be challenged.
In all of these efforts the quality of the children's education suffers, because the more schools change, the more difficult it is to have a baseline understanding of what kids should know and when. Now more than ever, homeschooling is becoming a reasonable alternative. I can assure you that I'm doing it on a part-time basis, just in case. Our public elementary school, for example, does not teach English grammar, and students do not know how to diagram sentences. It is just astounding that it has come to this.
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