HOW TO FIX PUBLIC EDUCATION: GET RID OF IT!

Read Lee's full article to see the sound reasoning behind his suggestions. After all, since Jimmy Carter in 1979, when the Dept. of Education was established, our educational standing in the world has plummeted.

Excerpt: If you want to fix America, you have to fix America’s broken education system; and you must start by getting rid of the one we have.

I’ve been up in front of too many classrooms in too many different schools, and had lunch in too many different teachers’ lounges, to be wrong about this. I have also sat through more school board meetings, in more towns, and pored over more school budgets, than I care to remember.

Here are a few suggestions for getting out from under the costliest and least effective education establishment in human history.

- De-certify the teachers’ unions.

- Abolish the U.S. Department of Education.

- Abolish the state education departments.

- Grant absolute autonomy to local school boards.

- Abolish the requirement for teacher certification.

- Give tax breaks to parents who home-school or send their kids to private school.

- Encourage churches to set up in-house schools and courses.

All of what we are proposing here is tried and true. It’s all been done before. After all, public schooling wasn’t even invented until well into the 19th century.

Surely we can get along without the unions fixed like tapeworms to our paychecks; without a federal Dept. of Education that was only created in 1979; without state educrats forcing local school districts to spend money that they don’t have; without teacher certification programs that are of no demonstrable benefit to anyone but those who provide them; and without failing schools that cost us $20,000 a year per child—where the superintendent and the assorted assistant superintendents have district paid-for cars and credit cards, the kids never learn how to read, and the toilets don’t flush. You’ve all seen such things on the nightly news.

If even a few of the above recommendations were adopted, we would have better schooling at a lower cost—which guarantees that the teachers’ unions will oppose them all.

Yes, I know—the public schools were better in the days of “Our Miss Brooks,” they weren’t that awful when the kids from “Leave It to Beaver” went there. A couple of decades of teacher certification programs and ultra-leftist union leaders have done their work only too well, and the schools are that awful now.

And it’s time we fixed it.

Read Lee Duigon's article here.