Yes, YOUR Public School is Awful

Make School Choice happen now - demand real accountability

Imagine you didn’t have a choice in your automobile purchase. You couldn’t pick a truck versus a sedan or an SUV, for instance. You couldn’t choose performance or luxury versus fuel economy. There were no options for safety or convenience, just whatever standard package came off the factory floor. Imagine there being only one choice available and it was made and dictated by the government - and for the privilege of owning this government car, you pay the government $15,000 per year. And that cost goes up every year. And that cost is only the direct cost of ownership. It doesn’t include the costs of operating the government oversight bureaucracies.

Moreover, the car is on average, just awful compared to the cars available in the rest of the world. It’s hugely unreliable, gets terrible mileage, lousy safety reviews and is largely stuck in the 1970s vintage era for engineering. While everybody complains about how awful these cars are, the only proposed solution is to make the cars more expensive. And so year in and year out, the price charged just keeps going up.

$15,000 a year for a Yugo!

This is analogous to the state of public education in America - and it doesn’t have to be this way.

Oh I’ve heard all the excuses over the decades. “My public schools are wonderful!” “We live in a conservative area….” “My kids had great teachers…”

The underlying fact remains that in our public schools today, on average, students perform far below proficiency - and the longer they’re in our public schools, the worse they perform. An increasingly small minority of students are attaining proficiency at grade level. We perform horribly compared to everybody else in the developed world - and we pay more per student for the privilege!

Here’s what your $15,000 a year is buying you.

“But public schools have to take all the kids, they can’t be selective.”

Nonsense. Private schools often take the “difficult cases” that public schools can’t accommodate. Lots of people homeschool their learning-disabled kids. Charter schools - quasi public in nature - are often set up in the most disadvantaged areas. And that still doesn’t address how awfully we perform compared to the rest of the world.

“But private schools are expensive.”

Not true. Average tuition at private schools in 2021 was $12,350. That’s actually a discount over public schools! And “expensive” is only because today, if you choose the private path, you pay twice - once on your property, income and sales taxes, and again when you write those tuition checks. If you could only deduct those costs from your taxes, well then you’d only be paying once.

Yes, your public schools are awful - you likely just don’t know it. Imagine how much better our schools would be if they had real accountability and competition. Better: imagine how many more choices you’d have if the funding for your kids simply followed the kids!

“But most people aren’t smart enough to decide on a curriculum for their kids…”

On that - I remember when the Soviet Union imploded in the 90s and we’d hear hysterical stories about average citizens who’d never had a choice in food or clothing or housing. “How do we decide what to buy?” Previously they only had the State stores for everything - someone else always made those decisions. That’s exactly what we sound like now - hysterical former inmates of Soviet colonies who’ve never been afforded a choice in education. You can do this!

I was a career military officer and we initially bounced our boys among public schools each time we moved (on average every two years). The process of registering in new districts each year, different standards at different grade levels, it quickly sapped our endurance - so we chose to homeschool. It was scary at first, but we figured it out and joined with other homeschool families and we made it work. We found curricula we liked and we mixed and matched with our kids’ interests and abilities. And much of this was before the internet we have today. It is so much easier now. Online education is so much more robust and widely available it’s becoming a major trend. I’ll wait until the pandemic inflated numbers recede to make a final judgment on where homeschooling stands, but conservatively it’s nearly 10 percent of all kids today.

There are lots of reasons to take your kids’ education into your own hands, but possibly none better than to avoid the incipient brainwashing and values programming of progressive teachers, administrators and school boards.

Maybe your school board isn’t a total Marxist disaster, but I guarantee you there will still be awful progressive woke teachers attempting to brainwash your kids. Nothing keeps a dedicated Marxist from introducing race, class and sexuality into just about any curriculum. Even math.

I have no idea how hard core pornography ends up in a public school library, yet it does. What’s the idea here? Who’s doing it? How does this filth get past the librarian? In what universe should this be permitted? Yet there it is - too graphic to describe in these pages, but you can go look this stuff up.

The reason all this happens - the runaway costs, the steady downward spiral of achievement, the injection of sexuality and social justice warfare into the classroom - there is no accountability. It happens on autopilot. It happens because our only reflex is to raise taxes “for the schools”. It happens because performance standards for teaching are nonexistent and there is no accountability for results.

And there can be no accountability so long as parents don’t have a choice. It’s not the parent’s “job” to fix the schools - we all have jobs already. If the school isn’t performing, we should be able to move our kids to someplace that meets their needs. And only through such market based forces will there ever be accountability.

Make Real School Choice a top priority for your state elected officials. Tell them. I heard a local politician recently say “nobody cares about school choice - I haven’t had a single constituent tell me that was a priority”. If that’s so, then shame on all of us.

There are a lot of priorities - lower taxes, fighting crime, jobs. But we need to seize this moment in time - while the Covid pandemic closures and mask theater are tightly in mind - to go after Real School Choice. The kind of choice where you decide what is best for your kids.

Find out who among your elected officials are taking money from the teachers union. That would be the organization ending in -EA in your state. The teachers unions are staunchly opposed to choice and dedicated to keeping this Soviet style government monopoly going forever. Insist that your elected officials make this a priority.

I like to believe we are at an historic inflection point on public education. It’s never performed worse and it’s never been more expensive than it is today. And with what we all witnessed during the pandemic - with the “work from home” set up - the realization is there.

We can do this ourselves.