Parental Choice And Education Excellence

It is clear the the path to a great education system requires we tie Education Funding to Competition and Accountability.

A major result of the No Child Left Behind legislation has been the revelation that a number of schools systems are crippling and destroying our children's education. When the North Carolina school system only graduates 60% of entering freshman on time, it is clear the children are being cheated. The American people strongly support reforms designed to save and educate the children. The first step would be to insist that federal funds only go to school systems which require teacher competency and accountability, which provide competition and which can prove they are educating the children.

The Friedman Foundation has recently done a study that is simply astounding in its conclusions. The economic cost to our society of public school failures are in the multi-billions of dollars for each class, just in North Carolina alone. Their estimate is $8.5 billion per graduating class over their lives. A decade of continued failure will cost the state of North Carolina $85 billion during our lifetimes. This does not mean that we need to spend more money on education. Other studies have proved the problem is not how much we spend but how much we waste. It is not that our teachers do not want to teach but that they are not allowed to teach effectively. Our schools are not focused on teaching but on promoting an egalitarian philosophy of tolerance and diversity. Unfortunately our children are often tolerant but can't add. They embrace diversity, but can't identify the flaws in an illogical premise. We used to expect our children to speak and write English effectively. Today they are promoted from one grade to another when it is clear they can do neither.

In our black majority district, support for education reform will not happen until members of the African American community accept that change must include recognizing which Party has caused the problem. The case that blacks must accept change to fix this problem has been articulated by Bill Cosby. I know what that change needs to include. Angela McGlowan has written a great book, "Bamboozled", in which she makes a powerful case for conservative blacks to return to the party which has always supported them. In her book, the third chapter is about school choice and the consequences for the education of our children of the "soft bigotry of low expectations." She talks in her book about the attacks that are focused on anyone who dares to point out the problems, ". . . our politically correct culture has made it all but impossible to have a candid dialogue about the state of academic achievements by blacks . . . "

We must change the course of education in America and our district. Of our 23 counties, not one school system is in the top quartile of education measurement. 14 of our counties are in the bottom quartile. That is 2-1/2 times the number that should be there based on normal statistics. What is a crisis for America and North Carolina, is an even bigger crisis here in our area. Talking honestly about the problems is a must.

The liberal courts have sabotaged classroom discipline. The unions have protected teachers who cannot teach. Our best and brightest educators have been paid higher wages to move into central administrative organizations that think about teaching but never actually teach. They promote fads and nonsense that does not and will not work. They too are protected from competition by tenure and unions. The liberal couts and teacher unions are protected by the Democrat Party at the cost of our son's and daughter's education. The wishes of parents are ignored.

Our nation is based on competition. The excellence of free enterprise and its ability to provide us with the highest standard of living in the world is competition. All year long our society shows its love for and admiration of the competition that is inherent in sports. We would not tolerate the elimination of competition from baseball, football or basketball. Yet in the area that touches every family most, the education of our children, we have allowed for bureaucrats to eliminate competition. We don't really need No Child Left Behind to tell us our public schools are failing. Parents already knew this.

A clear choice between those who want to save the children and those who want to save the bureaucrats would mobilize the country in favor of dramatic education reform based on competition. This competition must take the form of Charter Schools and Equal Opportunity Scholarships; with control of their children's choices by the parents. This should include home schooling for those parents who don't have access to other adequate options for their children.

Parents must be in charge. Parents should have options for educational excellence. Each school choice should compete for the parents support! How much of and for how long will you give up your share of that $85 billion that the Friedman Foundation identified as being stolen by school failures.