|
Recycling
Discredited Reforms
Tim
Kaine's pre-school initiative is just the latest
in a series of educational "reforms"
that won't work. The only one that will: Empower
parents to select their childrens' schools.
If
awards were given for recycling discredited public
policy reforms, government school proponents would
win every year. The difficulty would be selecting
a single winner among so many. This year’s top
contenders would no doubt be Governor Timothy M.
Kaine for his universal pre-school proposal and
Fordham Foundation president Chester Finn for his
national standards proposal.
Gov.
Kaine’s signature education reform initiative is
universal government-directed pre-school for
4-year-olds. He tasked his Strong Start Council
(established by Executive Order (1)
two days after taking office) to develop and
implement new pre-school guidelines – from
student transportation to the qualifications of
pre-school personnel and administrators – and to
recommend state funding levels to support them.
Kaine and his partners would have us believe that
government-funded universal preschool will rid the
state of all manner of education, social, and
workforce ills. “Children acquire the
foundation for desirable business skills such as
communications, teamwork and critical thinking
before age five,” their Smart Beginnings Website
tells parents and business leaders. “High
quality care involves consistent, dependable
caregivers and teachers with the skills and
education to provide a learning-rich,
developmentally appropriate environment. … Every
$1 invested in a high quality early childhood
program may yield $7-$9 in future savings.”
The return on taxpayer investment, they claim,
will be higher graduation rates and lower teen
pregnancy and incarceration rates.
Alas, there is little evidence to support these
claims, which is why California voters
overwhelmingly rejected a universal pre-school
initiative last year. (For a quick summary
on the ten myths of universal pre-school, visit
the Pacific Research Institute’s excellent chart.)
It isn’t the first time government school
monopolists have made grand promises they
couldn’t keep. Education historian Andrew
Coulson begins his book, "Market Education: the
Unknown History," with this vignette:
In 1841, Horace Mann, the godfather of American
public schooling, promised: “Let the
Common [public] School be expanded to its
capabilities, let it be worked with the efficiency
of which it is susceptible, and nine-tenths of the
crimes in the penal code would become obsolete;
the long catalogue of human ills would be
abridged.”
In 1998, the Los Angeles
County School Board voted to arm its public school
police with shotguns.
Has public
schooling failed?
Yes, it has.
The
United States spends more on education than most other
nations, according to a September 2006
international report,[2] but U.S. student
achievement continues to decline relative to other
nations. American 15-year-olds now score
near the bottom of their global peers in
mathematical skills, reasoning, and problem
solving, and U.S. graduation rates have fallen
from first among nations to middle of the pack.
It’s foolhardy to think that adding another
year to taxpayer-funded public schooling will
reverse these trends. To Chester Finn
and associates, the solution to failing public
schools is national education standards. In Fordham
Foundation’s August 2006 report, “To Dream the
Impossible Dream: Four Approaches to National
Standards and Tests for America’s Schools,”[3]
Finn et al insist that state standards and tests
are inadequate to meet America’s greatest
challenges in education. Other nations
have national standards, argues Finn, and so
should the U.S.
Yet many of those
nations are comparable in size and population to a
single U.S. state. Would the European Union
– a better parallel to the U.S. – be capable of
developing a single set of education standards
that satisfied all its member states? No,
and it has no plans to try.
(Interestingly, most European nations have adopted
some form of publicly-funded, free-market parental
choice among public and private schools, a
proposal that's largely ignored by U.S.
education reformers.)
What's more, the
U.S. traveled the national standards road a decade
ago and got stuck in the political mud. English language standards couldn’t get beyond
basic first grade reading disputes between phonics
and whole language. Nationally developed
math standards were so fuzzy that they were widely
ignored, and history standards proved so unpopular
that the U.S. Senate repudiated them in a 99-1
vote.
Finn is correct in asserting
that state governments have been unable or
unwilling to set, sustain, and police rigorous
standards for their public schools, but that’s a
direct consequence of the politically-driven
government education monopoly. Given
the track record of the No Child Left Behind Act,
it’s clear that federal policymakers are just as
weak-kneed as their state counterparts.
Though
from different sides of the political
aisle, Kaine and Finn share a common, almost
fanatical faith in a government monopoly as the
ideal vehicle for delivering the public education
service. They may be sincere. They are
sincerely wrong. Government isn’t the
solution; it’s the problem.
Throughout history, writes Coulson, the most
successful education systems have achieved high
levels of literacy “by allowing parents to seek
out the best teachers for their children. … The
standards and expectations of modern private
schools, which are typically higher than those of
public schools, are not elevated by the pen of a
lawmaker but by the private schools’ sense of
mission, their desire to excel, and their need to
meet the demands of their customers. High
standards are best achieved today as they have
always been, through the need for individual
schools to maximize their students’ potentials
or risk losing them to competitors.”[4]
Give some dubious award to government school
monopolists for recycling discredited
reform proposals. Their ideas deserve
nothing more than that.
--
October 9, 2006
[1]
Executive
Order 7
[2]
Education
at a Glance 2006
[3]
"To
Dream the Impossible Dream"
[4]
Coulson, Andrew. Market Education: the
Unknown History, Transaction Publishers, 1999, p
364
|
