School choice is the only way to save education
It’s obvious that our public school systems are not working. A Chicago-area resident, I recently read that in the inner-city Chicago public schools, 6% of the students have math skills at grade level, and 11% have reading skills at grade level.
I base my view that school choice would help because competition helps. And given the abject failures of our school systems, what have we got to lose? We need to try something else.
The Democrats who control the schools are beholden to the teachers’ unions, who don’t want school choice. But unions represent the interests of their members, not the interests of the students or the public. (So do professional organizations like medical organizations and bar associations, by the way.)
Politicians are not known for running good schools, especially because their choices are freighted with political implications. What we have now in our public school systems is a monopoly. Our country has always eschewed monopolies, and for good reason. And the problem is compounded because this monopoly is corrupted by a toxic combination of politics and unions.
School choice could free us from some of this. And school choice would mean that schools would have an incentive to work hard to produce good results or lose students. Poor performance creates the risk of going out of business. That incentive is absent from our current school system arrangement.
Kids who can’t read or do math are at a huge disadvantage in a modern society. That means that most of these kids won’t get good jobs. The Democrats are perpetrating a massive fraud by pretending they’re struggling because of ongoing white racism. With these kinds of educational deficits, these kids will not thrive. And a handful of kids getting into very competitive schools by affirmative action won’t make a bit of difference.
Yet the Democrats obsess over affirmative action and remain silent about the awful educational deficits in the schools on which huge numbers of inner-city kids depend. This is a misdirection fraud the Democrats have perpetrated at the expense of the black community and the white community alike.
Black people support Democrats because they think they’re sympathetic to them since they keep telling them they’re suffering because of the ongoing racism of white people. Instead of doing something about the educational system, or even trying to do something like school choice, the Democrats take the money and groundwork and votes provided by the teachers’ unions, do nothing about our school systems, and pitch ongoing racism to get the votes of black people.
It’s a giant misdirection and a massive fraud at a staggering cost to the black community, the white community, and the country.
File photo credit: Nick Philly, CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
