From Muths Truths:

By: Chuck Muth

Time to Give Choice a Chance

I recently wrote a column pointing out the absurdity of the teacher union’s position that simply paying teachers more money would make them do a better job. That elicited, not unexpectedly, howls of protest from the usual crowd of public school apologists, well-represented by this grammatically-challenged diatribe emailed to me by “mike hayes” (if that’s his real name):

“Are you familiar with what goes on in a classroom today? Teacher’s (sic) don’t just teach. The plethora of societal, physical, discipline and learning problems found in a classroom is stunning, it doesn’t say much for society as a whole. Kids enter the ‘Education System’ so parents can go to work or so teachers can raise the children for the people who shouldn’t be parents and don’t have a clue how to be one, some actually come prepared to learn, many come needing to be educated about how to learn and interact with other human beings before they can be taught; teacher’s (sic) handle this plus they have to try and educate parents who don’t understand their role as a parent and they diagnose the other problems that need to addressed by an array of social and physical specialists.”

Sheesh. As the old saying goes, Joan of Arc did less whining at the stake.

Parent-blaming defenders of the status quo such as “mike hayes” miss the key point. Let’s say for argument’s sake that everything he yelped about in his rant is true. Let’s say the system sucks (it does). And let’s say there are a thousand different things that could be tried to improve it. Maybe those things will work; maybe they won’t (remember “whole language”?).

But the real question is simply this: Who gets to decide?

Why should any parent be forced to allow the government to use their kids as guinea pigs while the bureaucrats and union leaders move from one educational experiment (fuzzy math, class-size reduction, all-day kindergarten) to the next while blaming parents for their failures in the process? Why shouldn’t concerned parents – especially lower and middle income parents who can’t afford private school tuition or a new house in the ‘burbs – be able to opt out?

Education is important. So is eating. But we don’t let the government run our farms and operate our supermarkets, do we? So why let it run our schools and grant it a virtual monopoly over them? And why can parents be trusted to decide which doctor will take care of their kids’ physical health but not which teacher will take care of their intellectual development?

Parents who are satisfied with the product the government collective is cranking out these days should be free to keep sending their kids to the government schools. But parents who want something different, something better for their kids, should be allowed to make that decision, too – just as they get to choose whether to go to Smith’s or Safeway, McDonalds or Burger King, Bank of America or U.S. Bank, Southwest or Delta, Wal-Mart or Target, Home Depot or Lowes, etc., etc., etc.

When it comes to education, it’s long past time to give choice a chance. After all, it’s the American way.