American Educational Disease: Its Cure through Voucher Schools

By L SwilleycloseAuthor: L Swilley Name: L Swilley
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9. Students: the worser ones with deadly, instinctive accuracy, aiming  for and hitting the jugular of every weakness in mandated school  policy on in school personnel for their own immediate, disruptive,  pleasure-seeking advantage; the better ones forced to  endure “inclusion” with officially-protected, uncontrollable  revelers, and/or bored to very death by busy-work or “fun” activities  assigned by dull, droning “teachers” who – if their students are so  lucky – are often but one unit ahead of the group they presume to  instruct.

10. Our octopoid federal government, ever encroaching on the  educational institutions of our country, empowered in its vicious  demands by its hog-tying, condition-ridden “grant” programs featuring  requirements of such stultifying, education-depressing moment that,  with considerable justice, one concludes that federal “education”  programs are invented and directed by certifiable yahoos obsessed with  an overpowering fear that someone, somewhere might actually be getting  an education – and consumed with a maniacal determination that that  certainly will not happen.

Exaggerations?  Perhaps.  But with enough real and recognizable  national present substance beneath to make the case that the public  education scene in this country is so terminally diseased, so riddled  with so many insurmountable problems and obstructions that nothing  short of a program that can cut through this Gordian knot of  educational pretzelling will serve to save it.

Voucher programs may save it. With vouchers, every student could  claim an amount equal to the publc-school, per-student expense in his  school district.  Since such an amount has been traditionally  considerably more than the tuition charged by the average private  school, students who wished to move to the private sector should be  able to do so, provided they are acceptable to the host private school.

“Aha!” say the voucher opponents. “What happens to those who are  NOT acceptable?”

They are not admitted, I hope.  For if the voucher school is  required to accept them under the present “inclusion” program – if,  indeed, the voucher school does not demand every right and privilege  it had as a private school before the voucher program was accepted -  the private school need not bother; that would be merely moving to new  buildings the problems it was chosen to solve; for under any of the  constricting terms public schools now suffer, voucher schools would  become no more than other public schools, laboring under the  opprobrium that, at present, plagues and cripples public education.   The established private school that accepts such conditions will  forfeit every educational advantage it had over the public system; it  will be merely another public school.  It will be a fool.

“Then,” the voucher-opponents say, “The public schools will be  left with the discipline problems and the academic underachievers.”

Yes. Plus those students who do not want – or whose parents do  not want – the inconvenience of their attendance at a more distant  even though better school. The upshot will be that the present public  schools will still have the much larger total student population.

“Then what is the advantage of this voucher program for public  education?”

By forcing the intensification of the heretofore untreated  problems that have hobbled the public systems, the voucher program  could compel those systems to refocus on and correct those things that  have so plagued them (but because of lack of competition, have been  cavalierly dismissed or tolerated; I mean spectacularly the problems  of poor discipline that makes teaching and learning impossible, the  tragic joke of teacher “certification,” top-heavy, forms-mad  administrations, politically and/or evangelistically motivated school  boards, busy work and “enriching” curricula, and the unrestrained  proliferation of extra-curricular activities – to name but a few.)   The necessary belt-tightening that must result from the loss of funds  surrendered to the private voucher schools will force the public  systems to re-evaluate every aspect of their work; they will have to  return to basics – if that is what they decide must be saved. But  whether they choose basics or balloon-blowing, they will have to  choose, for there will not be enough money for all the gimcrackery  they have recently palmed off on us as a proper educational program  for our children. Their facing that choice is the first step towards  the reform of the public school system.

The public school systems of this country have become gradually,  inevitably poorer because those who should be responsible in the front- lines of education have, without a whimper, surrendered that  responsibility to those in ever more remote camps: the teacher denies  his/her responsibility, saying that the principal is the problem; the  principal denies his/hers, pointing to the superintendent; the  superintendent points to the school board; the school board to the  state agency, and the state agency protests helplessness, pointing to  federal mandates. Finally no PERSON holds himself or herself  accountable and we all stand around wringing our hands, while  responsibility and authority for our schools are increasingly  delivered without protest or question – and in the name of “respect  for the law” – apparently into the hands of a sub-committee of clowns,  yawning dyspeptic clerks in the backwaters of the U.S. Education  Agency.

This process must be halted and reversed.  One step towards that  is the return of authority and responsibility to the individual school  and to the individual teachers who, after all, ARE the school. Voucher  schools will help that happen.