Education Watch

Few of the great tragedies of history were created by the village idiot, and many by the village genius. - Thomas Sowell

The Education Blob
By John Stossel

Since progressives want government to run health care, let’s look at what government management did to K-12 education. While most every other service in life has gotten better and cheaper, American education remains stagnant. Spending has tripled! Why no improvement? Because K-12 education is a virtual government monopoly — and monopolies don’t improve. In every other sector of the economy, market competition forces providers to improve constantly. It’s why most things get better — often cheaper, too (except when government interferes, as in health care).

The Blob claims teachers are underpaid. But today American teachers average more than $50,000 a year. Teachers’ hourly wages exceed what most architects, accountants and nurses make….constantly demands more money, but tripling spending …..have brought no improvement…..most powerful argument is that poor people need government-run schools……What he learned is that in India and China, where kids outperform American[s]….. “the majority of (poor) schoolchildren are in private school.” ….Low-income Americans are far richer than the poor people of China, India and Africa. So if competitive private education can work in Beijing, Calcutta and Nairobi, it can work in the United States.

Chicago-sized test of wills
By: George Will

The title of the nation’s largest labor union — the National Education Association — seems calculated to blur the fact that it is a teachers union. In this blunt city, however, the teachers union candidly calls itself the Chicago Teachers Union. Its office is in the Merchandise Mart, a gigantic architectural Stonehenge, which resembles a fortress located on the Chicago River, which resembles a moat. Which is appropriate.
Unions are besieged, especially public-sector unions, particularly teachers unions, and nowhere more than here. Teachers unions have been bombarded with bad publicity, much of it earned, including the movie “Waiting for ‘Superman,’” and have courted trouble by cashing in on sentimentality, cloaking every acquisitive demand in gauzy rhetoric about how everything is “for the children.”


###