Don't Know Much About Much

A recent poll of Americans had one fourth of its respondents stating they did not know the earth orbits around the sun. Another poll found that forty percent of Americans do not know which foreign powers the United States fought against in World War II. Almost one hundred percent of Americans  attend schools, mainly government schools, and over eighty five percent of  adult Americans have high school diplomas. It makes one wonder exactly the “educators” employed by government schools were doing with their charges for twelve or thirteen years of their lives.  If such high percentages of the inmates at  these schools finished their time without learning such basic facts, one has to wonder what else  they missed.  Similar polls and surveys, coupled with really dismal results of many widely used tests, suggest far too many students miss out on far too much at government schools, particularly those schools serving largely poorer people, and most particularly those serving poor black and Hispanic people. Thirteen years are a long time, longer than many prison sentences or corporate careers. To see so many people getting so little from so much time spent is sad and infuriating. 

This  is of course not news, and one did not need the two polls mentioned above to know it.  The overall performance of government schools is a national disgrace, one masked somewhat in public discussions because many talented and successful people of the sort who drive and participate in public discussions see their children developing well, and give the schools credit for that development, when, in fact, their children would probably do well with almost any type of schooling, including the one room school house. More meaningful metrics would measure how well the schools do with average students and students from difficult backgrounds, and that answer would be not well at all.

 Politicians pretend to care about all this, but there is no evidence they are serious. Democrats tend to want more money for their constituents employed by government schools, but seem uninterested in improvements.  Republicans often want more local control, but seem uninterested as well in making improvements, perhaps because many of the worst schools are in places where there are few people who vote for Republicans.

An obvious first step  toward improvement would be to admit that the failures and problems of government schools are not unique to them but rather particular instances of the failures and problems of government enterprises in general.  Socialized enterprises do not work well, as experience and sound economic reasoning show. As many people have said, whatever the case for governments’ funding the schooling of children, there is not much of a case for governments’ providing it as a near monopoly, apart from its having been  done that way for a long while. 

Experience and sound economic reasoning also show that competition among providers of goods and services tends to offer purchasers better and less costly products. If we are to keep funding schooling with taxes, but wish to  introduce competition, then vouchers of one form or another would be an obvious method to try. Employees of government schools  oppose vouchers emphatically, but rarely candidly. Their arguments that vouchers would benefit mainly rich  people by allowing them to move their children out of government schools are specious.   Wealthy parents already have options for schooling their kids outside of government schools, and everyone knows it. It is the parents of poor parents who have no outside options for their children at present and would have with vouchers. They, along with families with middle sized incomes who might be able to afford other choices but only with difficulty, are the main beneficiaries of vouchers. I believe the real reason for opposing vouchers is simpler. The people on  the payrolls of government schools fear they would be unable to compete for the parents’ dollars. It is not unfair to suppose that the reason for such fear is an understanding that their product is not good enough to attract paying customers.

I believe we need to overcome this opposition. Doing so will help  children from all backgrounds  -  those from poor or difficult backgrounds probably the most. This may be the best way to start to help large numbers of such children improve themselves and their situations in life, and one which probably will shrink government and control costs as well.