Wife and I homeschool our children. Why? The main reason is we want the best for them. Is it that we are the best? No, but we certainly don’t view government err, public schools as the way to get there. Proof is in the pudding… it’s a failed system. We’d consider private schools but it’s too expensive. Of course, if instead of having to fork over a bundle in taxes to fund the failed system I could use that money on the free market well… that’d be different.
Since 1980, government spending on education, adjusted for inflation, has nearly doubled. But test scores have been flat for decades.
Today we spend a stunning $11,000 a year per student — more than $200,000 per classroom. It’s not working. So when will we permit competition and choice, which works great with everything else?
Indeed. When will we permit competition and choice? In a sense, we do have that because we have chosen to homeschool. Of course, what facilitates that is Texas is quite a homeschool-friendly state; many states in the union and many countries make it difficult or flat out impossible to have such choice. Of course, I have no choice where my money goes… the tax man still taketh away.
To be fair, I’ve had some discussions about this with my more liberal-leaning friends that are in the education field. I must admit, I’m torn. I know the ideal of what I’d like to go for, but there are some realities that are difficult to address in that ideal. The reality is a group of people (city, state, country, etc.) does overall do better the more the entire populace of that group is educated. Look how it was hundreds of years ago where the elite did their best to keep the masses uneducated as a way to wield power over them. No, I don’t wish to return to that. But a truly open free-market system is tough to come about for education, I must admit, when you truly think through the logistics of human nature and trying to actually make things go. I don’t have the answers, but I’d love to try to find them.
Nevertheless, a lot of what this all comes down to is money. I know for a fact if I could keep more of my money I could well… do a lot more with that money. I was thinking the other day how a lot of our current financial situation is rather simple. You see, the government does nothing to earn the money it receives… it just takes, such is taxation. Plus we have no choice but to give the money to them, and if we don’t give it they will take it and make us suffer for having not given up our money. But then people scream about being taxed too much. So things get shuffled around… maybe personal taxes go down, but then business taxes go up. Or the taxes will get labeled something else, like a fee, and get quieted inserted into something else. The bottom line is, you pay no matter what you do. And in the end no matter what entity is getting taxed, ultimately folks it comes out of your pocket and off the sweat of your labor.
So there’s really only one way to make taxes go down: get government to stop spending so much.
There’s no other way.
Stossel continues:
To give the establishment its best shot, consider Head Start, which politicians view as sacred. The $166 billion program is 45 years old, so it’s had time to prove itself. But guess what: The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recently found no difference in first-grade test results between kids who went through Head Start and similar kids who didn’t. President Obama has repeatedly promised to “eliminate programs that don’t work,” but he wants to give Head Start a billion more dollars. The White House wouldn’t explain this contradiction to me.
Andrew Coulson, head of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Reform, said, “If Head Start (worked), we would expect now, after 45 years of this program, for graduation rates to have gone up; we would expect the gap between the kids of high school dropouts and the kids of college graduates to have shrunk; we would expect students to be learning more. None of that is true.”
So why does the money continue to be wasted?
Filed under: Politics Tagged: Education, Politics
