The Buffalo Public School system has been
in the press lately. Sadly, little of what has been said has illuminated
the most salient truths about that system. First, the ultimate fate of
government school students can be predicted by who their parents are, their
parents’ educational attainment and income and their home environment such as
how many books are in the home. (See, Government Schools Are Bad for Your
Kids, p. 85 and the citations therein.) Students who come from dysfunctional
home environments tend to do poorly in school. As the author of a book
called “Government Schools Are Bad for Your Kids,” I am the last person to
defend the system. That said, it is disingenuous to blame the teachers
and administrators for the entirety or even the lion’s share of the poor
results of Buffalo schools such as the dropout rate and poor achievement
tests. I will return to this point later.
Second, government schools are
bureaucracies and bureaucracies are organizations run primarily for the benefit
of bureaucrats. This is rooted in the nature of bureaucracies as having
unilateral power over others. Power tends to lead to unilaterally
beneficial relationships as there is a lack of incentive to cooperate and
accommodate the interests of those under the control of the bureaucracy, that
is, the taxpayers, parents, and students. Carl Paladino’s essay published
in Art Voice last week contains plenty of evidence for this. Where Carl
and I differ is this: I don’t think the problem can be fixed and Carl obviously
does.
Third, school board elections are rigged
and controlled by special interest groups. Again, this is a point that
Carl makes in his essay. I made it in great detail in my book. Unions and
other special interest groups tend to control these elections and are aided by
the very small turnout. This can’t be fixed. Only progressives
think there is a solution to every problem. The unions also donate huge
sums to politicians, making reform in Albany virtually impossible. In
sum, voting is like trying to stop a hurricane with your breath.
At this point in the argument,
conservatives will trot out the usual proposed solutions: vouchers, charter
schools, and tax credits. I have pointed out many times that
conservatives, lacking a coherent ideology, usually end up trying to make
progressive programs work better. Hence, they emit a variety of silly and
meaningless clichés such as “run government like a business” and “cut waste,
fraud, and abuse.” If you study these clichés closely, you will see that
although they tend to come from conservatives, they are based on a progressive
premise: that government can be made to work well with just a few tweaks.
There is zero evidence for this belief.
Conservatives, like 90 percent of
Americans, have been captured by the progressive ideology that has ruled the
country for the last 100 years. That being the case, they are reluctant
to draw the obvious conclusions: government schools are bad for your kids; they
can’t be fixed; they can’t be reformed; and the only solution is to your pull
your kids out now. Efforts to save the system or methods that preserve a
large measure of state control over education such as vouchers are not the
answer. These proposals have also failed on a political level because of
the domination of Albany by educational special interest groups.
Reformers
have been trying to fix what ails the government schools for at least fifty
years. They have failed. It is time for parents to abandon these
daytime juvenile detention and propaganda centers. There are plenty of
alternatives including Catholic schools, private schools, homeschooling and the
latest trend, co-op schools, a hybrid between private schools and home
schooling where the school is run by the parents who share teaching
responsibilities. The digital age is making these alternatives more
viable for people of modest means.
As more and more people leave the
government schools, private sector alternatives will become more plentiful,
varied and less expensive. The bad old system will collapse under its own
weight. And good riddance. As we already explored at the beginning
of this article, they failed in their key mission: to level the educational
playing field for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. To see how
that experiment is working in Buffalo, visit Part 1 of City Court where
prisoners are arraigned.
James Ostrowski is a trial and appellate lawyer in
Buffalo, NY. He is CEO of Libertymovement.org and author of several
books including Progressivism: A Primer on the Idea Destroying America.
See his
website.