The value of a public education

Of course it depends on where you live. There are so many “bedroom communities” where families live in order to have their kids attend the local public schools. And the parents still care, vote, and participate in the control of the schools. It is so much more than a simple economic question about where to live. And many of the teachers and staff have their kids go to the same schools. There is a shared value of ownership and control and standards. This is so American.

In schools as aforementioned, another value is learned. We are truly all equal in opportunity, and hard work and discipline provides advantages in school, and later in life. This is not some quaint new idea to be patronized by politicians who think of their kids as superior by birth, or assumed having special advantages by going to private schools. Rather it can be more American brutal when a British trained student (my poo poo doesn’t stink) comes back to America in a public school environment, where his poo poo may stink. The normal American line applies: I wish I could buy him for what I think he is worth, and sell him for what he thinks he is worth, and I would be a rich man.

As a private citizen, it still hurts my feelings when I hear the derisive term “government schools”, though the point is well taken. I am a product of public education from the old days, and think well of it, hence my feelings are hurt. And I have experience with Catholic school education inside the Atlanta perimeter in the last two decades, and it is not what it used to be. The problems I perceive, and know about because I have kids, are more systemic and localized more to urban areas and some other areas; where the citizens have made the teaching of our kids an adult jobs program, with unions and restrictive laws that often protect the individual student over the group learning inherent in any classroom. The restrictions will go from benign good intents, as in including mentally retarded kids in a class, to more selfish ideas of including young thugs in the making, at the detriment to the class as a whole.

The “government school” term is also a code word for giving up on public education, and the power of all the unions and voters that have brought some of the USA public education down. I for one believe in vouchers to private schools, just because it seems to work better than what happens in too many school districts today. All citizens have to live in “today” with the kids they have today. Again, there are more succeeding districts than failing districts. But giving up is un-American, and all the advantages public education provides are worth fighting, and voting for.

So vote, mostly at the local and state level. Reverse the laws or rules that have taken away teacher and staff flexibility to use their American judgment, and enhance the laws that allow these same teachers and staff to be held American accountable, as in firing. If it takes more taxes and funding to hire more lawyers defending teachers and staffs doing our will, so be it. This is a tried and true method, it is not rocket science, and it works. Think of our lawyers against their lawyers. The idea of public education is worth fighting for, and in our National Interest.