Issues Tearing Our Nation's Fabric The Center for Reclaiming America

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School Choice
Chapter Twenty

Public education in this country began in the late 18th century as the result of local initiatives designed to help families ensure that their children would have competent math, history, and language skills. Land for public schools was generally donated by farmers or businesses, and citizens helped clear the land, erect schoolhouses, and raise funds to pay teachers. From the beginning, parents and other members of the community worked together to design and plan the nature of their children’s education, and members of the community shared a sense of personal responsibility for the success of the local schools.

During the late 19th century, however, under the influence of theorists such as Horace Mann, William James, and John Dewey, the emphasis of public education shifted from a standardized curriculum for all students to a "differentiated curriculum" to prepare young people for their "social roles." Pioneers of the public school movement believed that the schools existed primarily for the purpose of socializing children for the benefit of the state. Therefore, they said, education could no longer be left to citizens, but should be controlled by an informed elite of educators empowered by government. Passage of compulsory attendance laws in the 1920s helped ensure there would be no dissenters.

Today there are more than 83,000 elementary and secondary schools in this country supported by taxpayer funding of more than $200 billion per year (compared to $60 billion in the 1960s, in statistically equivalent dollars), all for the sake of the socialization of America’s children. As virtually every analysis of education over the last thirty years has shown, the intellectual attainment of American public school students under this rubric has fallen to the lowest levels in history, and the United States ranks near the bottom in all competitive exams with students of other industrialized nations.

So what is wrong with the public schools? Quite simply, the experiments of Mann and Dewey have failed. The National Education Association (NEA) has complained that failure in the classroom is due to inadequate funding. Former NEA president Mary Futrell claimed, "The nations’ students today are threatened only by the failures of policymakers to give education the money it deserves." But that analysis is far from the truth.

The Hidden Agenda

Results of three major studies, prepared by the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, of budget proposals of the NEA in 1993 and 1994 showed that the claim of underfunding was false and misleading. Analyst John Berthoud said, "no country or civilization in the history of the planet has spent more money educating its children than America in the 1990s." An analysis of proposed budgets presented to the 104th Congress by the NEA showed that if their demands were actually enacted, federal spending would increase by at least $702 billion per year. This, in turn, would lead to a tax increase of $10,554 per year for a family of four, a figure 13 times higher than the previous year’s budget.

But for all the added revenue they requested, the union offered no remedy for its own faulty curricula and no plan to eliminate the dangerous socialist policies at the root of student failures. Instead, as Berthoud says, priority was given to political activism and supporting liberal candidates for national, state, and local political offices.

The Tocqueville report showed that the members of Congress backed by the NEA had supported legislation that would increase federal spending by $302 billion per year. The agenda of the NEA and the education establishment is not, nor has it ever been, to improve the quality of education in this country. Berthoud’s analysis shows clearly that the aim of the union is to increase taxes in support of teachers and to increase entitlements for their own benefit. "The net result," he says, "is devastation for America’s children."

As discussed in chapter 10, "Goals 2000 and OBE," the purpose behind the professional teachers’ unions and the Department of Education’s control over local schools is the indoctrination of American young people with the "politically correct" social values of the liberal establishment. While serving as chancellor of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala confessed that the goal of today’s education is "a basic transformation of American higher education in the name of multiculturalism and diversity." And Glenn Maloney, an assistant dean at the University of Texas at Austin, said that, "Multiculturalism will be the key word of education. I believe that will be the mission of the university in the 90s."

Can it be Fixed?

For centuries Western Civilization has taught that education is one of the most essential requirements for a healthy, informed, moral, and successful society. Most parents want to see their children receive a good education in order to improve their chances of success in life. But those who place their children in today’s public schools are risking more harm to their children than they realize. Sex education promotes promiscuity among teens; diversity training teaches a profound disrespect for our cultural and religious foundations; and educational achievement in the nation’s public schools is so low, as the head of the American Federation of Teachers recently testified, that America’s high school graduates cannot be admitted to colleges anywhere else in the world. Adding insult to injury, the traditional values and moral discipline taken for granted in all our founding documents are openly scorned today.

The Bible instructs parents to "Train up a child in the way he should go" (Proverbs 22:6), whereas the public schools seem to work very hard to train up our children in the way they should not go. This realization has led to a surge of parental activism to reform the public schools, to defund the National Education Association, to shut down the U.S. Department of Education, and to provide parents better and more flexible alternatives in their choice of schooling. With more opportunities for "school choice," parents and communities want to determine freely, democratically, what works best for them.

If government and the unions truly cared for children, they would be the first to applaud these school-choice initiatives. Tax incentives, vouchers, alternative schools, and the right to choose between a variety of local schools which offer curricula focusing on either science, liberal arts, fine arts, vocational skills, technology, or other specialized interests, would seem to be a natural and desirable option. But the NEA has fought tooth and nail to block any proposed changes, not because of the risks to children, but for their own mercenary interests.

As Don Closson of Probe Ministries has illustrated in his study of educational opportunity, one of the best modern examples of a school that actually works is Westside Preparatory School in Chicago, which serves primarily low-income inner-city children from single-parent homes. Many of Westside’s students had been written off by the state. But the school’s director, Marva Collins, realized that low levels of educational attainment were not the fault of children, but of a public school system that tolerates failure and condones the worst kinds of behavior.

Collins designed a curriculum based on the classics of Western Civilization. All her students are expected to read, memorize, and recite Shakespeare, Milton, and Donne. They learn algebra, calculus, and physics, as well as music and fine arts, and a complete program of challenging subjects that help make Westside’s students among the most welcomed and sought-after high school graduates in the country at the nation’s colleges and universities.

The success of these children proves that social programs are not the way out of the ghetto, but healthy personal values and a "self-respect" that go much deeper than mere "self-esteem" are. Marva Collins says of her school, "The expectations are as high here as in the most nurtured suburban area." The tendency of public school educators to look down on children’s abilities, expecting less because times are tough or the kids are poor, actually robs children of their opportunity to succeed. Collins’ motto says it very well, "We are known by our deeds, not our needs."

What are the Options?

Senator Edward Kennedy has complained repeatedly that school choice would be "a death sentence for public schools struggling to serve disadvantaged students, draining all good students out of poor schools." But his argument is unfair and untrue. Many private schools, including the Catholic schools in which Mr. Kennedy was educated, have reserved space for years for disadvantaged children. Scholarships and assistance are almost always available, and many new options are being proposed at this moment for tuition assistance and tax-credits to enable parents to choose the schools that would be best for their kids.

Studies of children who leave public schools and enroll in Catholic schools show significant increases in academic achievement. Equally important, race is not nearly the factor in achievement that public-school educators have claimed for many years. Students of all races show marked improvement in performance when educated in Christian and other private schools that demand high achievement and wholesome moral values.

In some states, parents have been allowed to set up "charter schools" as an alternative to the public schools. In Colorado, for example, the Charter Schools Act of 1993 permits parents to organize local schools, publicly-funded, but operated privately by local communities. The day-to-day administration and curriculum modules are determined by parents and local teachers working together.

The risk of the charter-school concept, however, is that these schools often come under the same regulations and teachers unions as the public schools. In states such as Michigan, the schools are forced to comply with state-controlled "outcomes" and other social directives. Charter schools in these situations have the freedom to manage themselves independently, but not the authority to dismiss the agencies and bureaucrats who created the education catastrophe in the first place.

An alternative form of school choice is the school voucher system. Basically, vouchers would provide tax credits to parents to be used as cash in paying tuition for their children in the schools of their own choice. A portion of each dollar in school taxes would be refunded to parents in the form of a voucher. If the school of choice is more expensive than the amount of the voucher, parents would be required to make up the difference from their own resources or, in some cases, through scholarships.

Another option, private vouchers, has been tried successfully in Indiana, Texas, Colorado, New York, and Arizona. Under a concept conceived by J. Patrick Rooney, chairman of the Golden Rule Insurance Company, large corporations and private donors underwrite an endowment to provide scholarships for local students to attend a wide range of private schools.

Taking a Stand

A Gallup poll shows that 60 percent of parents want more choice in education. But if America’s schools are to be renewed, the initiative will not come from the bureaucrats who feed at the public trough. It will come from parents, families, communities, and local organizations who understand the need and expect more than the government has been willing or able to give.

You can contact these organizations:

Separation of School & State Alliance
4578 N. First, Ste. 310 Ste. 203
Fresno, California 93726
(209) 292-1776

Center for Education Reform
1001 Connecticut Ave., N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20036
(800) 521-2118

For further reading:

On the World Wide Web:

Center For Education Reform: /http://edreform.com/
Eagle Forum: http://www.eagleforum.org/
Leadership University: http://www.leaderu.com

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Copyright 1997, Coral Ridge Ministries. All rights reserved.