Are we taxing ourselves 1) to buy the educations our children need for bright futures, or 2) to provide financial security for a group of public employees? Most would answer "1", but "2" is almost certainly the reality in too many government schools.
The Rocky Mountain Foundation will report periodically on its examination of that question and many others surrounding K-12 education, such an important part of the foundation of our future.
K - 12 Education
K-thru-12th grade public schools use about 40 percent of Colorado’s general fund expenditures. For some advocates, the dollars committed to public schools are never enough. Others are left to wonder just what would be “enough.” Or, possibly, too much.
Decades of steadily increasing per-student expenditures, after adjusting for inflation, have not bought an improved “product” – the yearly cohort of youngsters being graduated from Colorado’s public high schools and sent on their ways, whether into working lives, higher education or whatever other choices they make.
Too much evidence shows expenditures and achievements moving in opposite directions, expenditures up, achievements down. When one thinks about that picture and the collective institutional failure it suggests, one basic question begs to be asked: Are we taxing ourselves to buy the educations our children need for bright futures, or to provide financial security for public employees?
The Rocky Mountain Foundation will report periodically on its examination of that question and many others surrounding K-12 education and government schools.
On teachers unions
Anyone who saw
John Stossel’s brilliant 2006 piece “Stupid in America” on ABC News may particularly remember Randi Weingarten, the president of New York City’s teachers’ union and of the American Federation of Teachers. A picture being worth 1,000 words, Weingarten’s snarling appearance would make an apt illustration for the thoughtfully entertaining commentary below.
Could spirits move teachers union? Bah! By Peter Huidekoper, Special to the Rocky Mountain News Published December 24, 2008
What is the difference between the teachers union and Ebenezer Scrooge?
An odd question? Not if you just finished teaching A Christmas Carol while also reading about President- elect Obama's nomination of a new secretary of Education.
My students knew ahead of time that Scrooge would change. This December, though, we looked closely at those passages where Charles Dickens shows us that Scrooge wanted to change.
A central question around the debate on Obama's choice asked whether the nation's education leader would be a "compromise" candidate, a "diplomatic reformer," someone keenly aware of the importance of the unions to the Democratic Party, who would nudge without being a threat to the powers that be? Or, instead, would Obama choose someone more confrontational - in the manner of the superintendent in the nation's capital, Michelle Rhee, who insists school leaders need to put "everything on the table" - including the teachers' contract and tenure - in seeking to improve the education system? Rather than "cut deals," Rhee says the federal government should "be bold and aggressive about reform and take on entrenched interests, including the teachers' unions."
That Scrooge has a capacity for change becomes evident early on in his visit with the Ghost of Christmas Past. On seeing himself as a boy, alone, cruelly left at school during Christmas vacation, Scrooge expresses "pity for his former self." Scrooge then wishes he could have done more for the boy singing Christmas carols outside his office on Christmas eve. "I should like to have given him something."
Similarly, when reminded of the jovial and generous way Mr. Fezziwig, for whom young Ebenezer had apprenticed, celebrated Christmas with his employees, Scrooge again hints at remorse. "I should like to be able to say a word or two to my clerk just now." An early sign that - given a second chance - he will become a true friend to the Cratchit family.
By the time the Ghost of Christmas Present appears, Scrooge is humbled. The magical night is having its effect.
"Spirit," he tells the Ghost of Christmas Present, "conduct me where you will." He admits that he went with the Ghost of Christmas Past "on compulsion, and I learnt a lesson which is working now. Tonight, if you have aught to teach me, let me profit by it."
But such "profit" is painful. In his final moments the Ghost of Christmas Present forces Scrooge to confront Ignorance and Want, and convicts the miser of his failure to help his fellow man.
Increasingly repentant, Scrooge is willing to undergo his last grim journey. "Ghost of the Future! I fear you more than any spectre I have seen! But as I know your purpose is to do me good, and as I hope to live to be another man from what I was, I am prepared to bear you company, and do it with a thankful heart."
In spite of the fierce exterior we witness in the opening scenes of the story, Scrooge has a chance for redemption all along - for inside, he wants better.
I was briefly a member of our teachers union close to 30 years ago (I recall being happy about the benefits of the dental plan). But the way the union reps poisoned the school climate with grievances and disrespect left me cold. When the union told me who to vote for in 1980, I was appalled.
I am in my 17th year of teaching now - only two as a union member. I have seen little in 30 years to make me believe the teachers union wants to change. I see no reason to believe it will stop defending the dismal performance of "the bottom 6 percent" in our profession. I see no evidence it has the capacity to recognize the obstacle it has become to the flexibility districts and schools need to better serve their students, especially those most at-risk.
I hear a union that is proud of its role in the system. Defensive. Not a trace of remorse. "Why should we change?" its leaders would ask. If the Ghost of Christmas 2020 or 2030 showed the teachers union its neglected gravestone, I doubt it would cry out, "Why show me this if I am past all hope?"
As Scrooge cries out.
Hence my answer to the opening question.
Scrooge was willing to change.
Peter Huidekoper teaches in Parker.
Government schools — the left's brainwashing paradise?
The script of a friend's fifth grade daughter's 2008 Christmas Season play was written entirely around "being green," most of it global-warming brainwashing. It turns out the script was written by John Jacobson, a leftie educator whose California campaign for Congress included a position on global warming Al Gore could have written. Adding insult to injury, the school paid a royalty to perform Jacobson's play.
This child's mother is reliably anti-left and usually has a keen eye for its propaganda. However, she adores the child's school and thought the play altogether entertaining. No problem.
This illustrates a major challenge we face in trying to improve government schools: the parent who knows and acknowledges that government school systems are frequently broken, but who considers her own child's school a paragon that can do just about nothing wrong. — John Dendahl
Here's more on the brainwashing of our kids:
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Public Schooling and Economic Crises by Jacob G. Hornberger
We should not underestimate the powerful role that public — that is, government — schooling plays in the current economic crisis roiling American society. From the first grade through the 12th grade, most American children attend public schools. Several hours a day under government tutelage for twelve years is a very long time.
One of the ironies of public schooling is that the students have no idea that their minds and mindsets are being molded into a certain direction, one that is likely to remain fixed for the rest of their lives. Yet, that is the primary reason that government officials wish to have control over the education of the children in a nation: to mold their minds in such a way as to make them good, little citizens when they grow up, ones who believe in and support the doctrines and dogmas that state officials promulgate.
Adolf Hitler, a fierce believer in public schooling, put it well when he declared,
“When an opponent declares, ‘I will not come over to your side.’ I calmly say, ‘Your child belongs to us already…. What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.’”
One of the biggest public-school success stories is with respect to economics. How many students in public schools are exposed to the libertarian economic philosophy of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Henry Hazlitt, and Frederic Bastiat? I’d venture to say only a very small percentage. I know this: throughout my own time in the 12 years I attended public schools and the four years I majored in economics at a state-supported college, I never heard those names or even a mention of Austrian economics.
Instead, I was subjected to such standard claptrap as Keynesianism and how Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal saved free enterprise. It wasn’t until after I graduated from law school that I discovered Mises, Hayek, and the free-market Austrian paradigm. I then spent years educating myself on real economics, not the pseudo economics that is taught in public schools and state-supported colleges and universities.
Those who look to Barack Obama or the U.S. Congress or the federal government for salvation from America’s economic woes are looking in the wrong direction. Those people are the problem, not the solution. It is their policies that are bringing ruin to our nation. They are the ones who have the quest for power, and it’s that quest that is the root of the problem.
Throughout history, the counterweight to those who thirst for power has been a citizenry who loves liberty. The lovers of liberty have ensured that those who love power have had their love of power restrained and constrained so that it could not do too much harm to the nation. That’s what the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were all about — to protect us from the likes of those who suffer from a severe love of power.
As Barack Obama and the U.S. Congress argue over how much more money they’re going to spend to “revive” the U.S. economy, how many more banks and financial institutions they’re going to bail out, how many more regulations they’re going to impose on American businesses, and how much they’re going to raise taxes, the American public remains dumb-founded. While people seem to have a sense that something is amiss, they just don’t know what it is. For much of their lives, it was ingrained in them that the Industrial Revolution was a horrible thing, that the gold standard was an antiquated mechanism, that regulations were needed to keep people safe, that free enterprise failed in 1929, that the Federal Reserve keeps the monetary system stable, that the New Deal saved free enterprise, that Social Security monies are kept in a fund, that government spending stimulates the economy, that savings are bad and consumption is good, and that welfare programs help the poor and bring prosperity to society.
It never occurs to most people that all this is intellectual junk and that the reason they so easily fall for it is because of their mindsets that the state formed during their most formative years. In fact, the government school system is so successful that most people honestly believe that it’s essential to a free society, notwithstanding its coercive, military-like, indoctrination environment.
Yet, freeing one’s mind from the years of state indoctrination, while difficult, is not impossible. I’m proof of that and so are most other libertarians. Many of us attended public schools and state-supported colleges and we have been able to free ourselves of what the state did to us. If we could do it, so can everyone else. And that’s what’s needed for us lovers of liberty to take our country back from the lovers of power.
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
