Progressive Utopia: Detroit

Coming to a city near you.

Is school choice making some ground?

School Choice and the problem of bureaucracy

Here’s a great clip from a British T.V. show on how government bureaucracy has ingrained itself to the school system and how hard it is to dislodge it.

HT: Andrew Roth@ Club for Growth

Charter Schools popular in Harlem

From The Economist:

THOSE who had won whooped with joy and punched their fists. The disappointed shed tears. Some 5,000 people attended April 17th's Harlem Success Academy Charter School lottery, the largest ever held for charter schools in the history of New York state. About 3,600 applied for 600 available places, and 900 applied for the 11 open slots in the second grade.

The desperation of these parents is hardly surprising. In one Harlem school district, not one public elementary school has more than 55% of its pupils reading at the level expected for their grade. And 75% of 14-year-olds are unable to read at their grade level. So Harlem parents are beginning to leave the public school system in crowds.

Despite what United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten tells us about the “failure” of school vouchers and charter schools on Charlie Rose, desperate parents living in one of the toughest parts of New York City are aching for something better for their children than the usual rhetorical pabulum served up by the Teachers Union. In the interview with Charlie Rose, Ms. Weingarten tells Rose that the voucher program in Milwaukee is a failure and that therefore, she insinuates, the system will not work in New York City (Harlem). What she fails to understand or willfully ignores, is that a similar lottery system exists in Milwaukee as in Harlem. For the first eight years of its existence, Milwaukee's program was capped at about 1,500 students, for the next eight it was capped at 15,000. It is currently capped at 22,500 students. By getting local and state governments to kowtow to their powerful lobby, the teachers union effectively rigged the voucher market for difficulties and failure by putting an artificial cap on student enrollment. After all, if we capped the number of cell phones that Apple could sell, there would not only be a shortage of these items, but any excess demand by consumers would have to find other providers for a similar item. Unlike the cell phone market where there are many providers, the education market is dominated by one large monopoly. Students that don’t win the lottery must submit themselves to the local public schools. Additionally, if a charter school wants to expand enrollment, it can not do so quickly and easily due to its restrictive mandate. This is hardly a free-market and most certainly not a fair test of school vouchers or charter schools. The fact that a lottery is used to reward participation in a charter school is proof enough that Ms. Weingarten is being disingenuous and that charter schools are a lot more popular than the teachers union would ever care to admit.

Public schools and the Union

From Reason TV:

Vikki Reyes has had it with Locke High, the school her daughters attend in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. She walked in on class one day and recalls “the place was just like a zoo!” Students had taken control, while the teacher sat quietly with a book.

Comment: I grew up in a rough part of N.Y.C and I also had the misfortune of having attended a high school that was very much like the one portrayed in this video. I am convinced that the only way to improve our public schools is by creating the market incentives that do not exist now in education. Teachers unions like to talk about how much they care about our kids but the results, as seen in this video, are almost always less than desirable.

How Schools Fail Our Children

If you live in the state of Washington you may want to see this video. When I first saw this video I was astonished and then I became quite angry at what children in the state of Washington are learning as “math” in some of their schools. This video vividly explains some of the setbacks that kids have had to endure at the hands of an educational bureaucracy that is no longer accountable to parents, pupils, or communities.

I have great respect for teachers and the teaching profession. But as a parent, when I find out that these sorts of things are going on in public schools, I wonder why there aren’t more teachers speaking out against these teaching methods. It seems to me that the only time I hear from teachers is when there is a threat to their jobs or salaries. And we usually hear from them through their union representative or when they muster their students to lobby for their needs.

No right to Home Schooling in CA

It seems as if the first amendment has very little weight and meaning in the state of California. An appeals court has ruled against home schooling and will effectively force parents that practice this type of free choice into having to hold state credentials to teach their own kids. Strangely, this case started out as a child welfare case and not as a test of the legality of home schooling. After reading the ruling, I came away with the impression that the judges in this case were largely biased against the parents because they were teaching their children Christian values: These judges clearly did not like the Christian education being taught to these children. While I am not a religious person, I do believe that parents have a right to teach their kids at home (if they wish and in any faith) and that state power should be constrained in order to avoid an abrogation of individual choice and rights.

Incidentally, there is one group that was overjoyed with the decision: The teachers union.

Read the ruling and the article inSFGate