Reader Advised by Wolves alerted me to a post by Jane Galt in which she addresses her support for vouchers. My attention is drawn to this single sentence in her rather long and well-reasoned post:

I want a voucher system not because I have it in for teachers, but because I want a school system that is more responsive, child focused, creative, outcome-oriented, and effective.

Not entirely unexpectedly, I have some thoughts on the matter.

Jane’s first point (with 24 to follow) is:

1) The American educational system sucks.

I would like to point out that the American educational system has many very fine schools. I will go further to explicitly state that once you take minority schools out of the equation, there are many, many good schools that turn out legions of shiny new college students every year.

For instance, the Shelby County schools system attracts and keeps good teachers, pays them above average wages yet spends less per student than every other school system in Tennessee (which consistently ranks at the bottom in the nation for dollars per student spending). Further, three years ago they achieved one parent in the PTA for every student in the system – something that has not been achieved in any school system before or since. But parent participation remains high and the school system consistently receives “A”s from the feds and the state.

But in inner city schools, even the brightest of kids aren’t allowed to learn because a black child that tries to pay attention is ostracized for “acting white”.

And so in the city of Memphis (which lies within Shelby county but has a different school system), teachers are little more than embattled babysitters, parents are largely indifferent and kids are growing up stupid.

White flight – and affluent black flight – continues to tax the county’s resources, while Memphis is increasingly a majority poor, black community.

It’s not the school system, folks. It’s a culture thing.

The bottom line is that culture of Black America is sick. We can’t fix the educational system without that particular subculture taking a long, hard look at itself and addressing some fundamental issues. Yes, you can blame decades of welfare for decimating the strong family values that once were the mainstay of the Black community. Children are having children and fathers are absent. It’s a pit from which few escape.

But White Guilt is powerless to fix this problem from the outside.

If that makes me a racist, so be it. But then so is Dr. Bill Cosby (and I’ll be proud to stand with him any day of the week). Blacks may say I have no right to say such things because I am not one of them (and many do). Tough. An outside observer can see that there is a problem – you’d have to be blind not to see it.

I call for segregation. That’s right, the scary “S” word.

No child left behind is crap, because year after year we are leaving legions of children behind.

It’s time to recognize that fact and separate the ones that have the necessary support system, whether it is involved parents or just a hard-working single mother that insists that her child works hard, passing on the work ethic that made this nation great.

How do we segregate these future successes from the influence of their life-sucking peers?

Vouchers.

We must remove the bright minority students from their I-am-a-victim culture and put them in private schools where they are given a chance to succeed. Those kids that fail, become disruptive, succumb to gang pressures – kick them out and make them go back to the current failing schools. (This is a vital element; the private schools must have the freedom to deny service to anyone. Over-regulation will kill the effectiveness of the voucher initiative!)

We’ll never separate the wheat from the chaff from within “the system”. Vouchers will allow kids with promise, drive and determined parent(s) to extricate themselves from the culture of failure. Vouchers will give them a chance.

Call me an optimist, but I believe vouchers and capitalism will fix our problem.

In a dozen years, we will have a generation of black students going to college. Not because they are black, but because they are bright and ambitious and prepared and capable.

In two decades we will see the reemergence of the black family. Educated, successful fathers tend to stick around when they father children. Educated, successful men tend to stay married. Color has no bearing on these facts.

In a quarter century we will have blacks succeeding in our workforce, entering the ranks of executives or starting businesses. Not because they are black, but because they are smart and educated and have learned to think.

In a half century, affirmative action will be a thing of the past and racism will have dropped to a mere murmur compared to the constant, deafening cacophony that we have now.

We can’t save everyone, so let’s start by saving those we can and increasing that percentage every year. Eventually, we won’t need to save anyone.

If we don’t do something different, we’ll just have 50 more years of failure.

On the average, teachers are better paid than architects or economists according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. From today’s Opinion Journal:

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, public school teachers earned $34.06 per hour in 2005, 36% more than the hourly wage of the average white-collar worker and 11% more than the average professional specialty or technical worker.

I’ve always maintained that we overpay most teachers, because you just will when the system is based on how many years you can stomach showing up for work instead of how well you do your job. This, too, is addressed in the article:

In fact, the urban areas with the highest teacher pay are famous for their abysmal outcomes. Metro Detroit leads the nation, paying its public school teachers, on average, $47.28 per hour. That’s 61% more than the average white-collar worker in the Detroit area and 36% more than the average professional worker. In metro New York, public school teachers make $45.79 per hour, 20% more than the average professional worker in that area. And in Los Angeles teachers earn $44.03 per hour, 23% higher than other professionals in the area.

Hell, I’ve been an Oracle database administrator, an applications development manager, a project manager and am now in charge of a global initiaitive and I certainly don’t pull down figures like that. Wish I could start getting a garaunteed raise every year from a job that it’s virtually impossible to get fired from.

Teachers are trusted with our most important resource, our children’s future. A good teacher can change a child’s life, and should be rewarded far beyond anything I should dream of. But sadly, these teachers are far too few and the crop of administrators running our schools are even worse.

And don’t give me that crap about teachers buying their own school supplies. Our schools have regular rip-offs fundraisers and ask for donations of pens and paper.

Move over “Big Oil.” Academia is just as greedy and immoral.

Heh. Explanation At the Zoo.

Southern Baptists are looking to depart en masse from public schools:

A committee at the Southern Baptists’ annual gathering was scheduled to report Wednesday on a resolution that would urge the denomination to form a strategy for removing Southern Baptist children from public schools in favor of home schooling or education at private schools. …

“We are commanded biblically to train our children in the nurture of the Lord,” said Roger Moran of Troy, Mo., who sits on the executive committee and offered the proposal with Texas author Bruce Shortt. “The public schools are no longer allowed … to even acknowledge the God of the Bible.”

One can hardly blame them, given the current situation in our schools:

Brittany McComb, valedictorian of Foothill High School in Clark County, Nevada, stood up at her graduation and began to speak. A few paragraphs into her speech, school administrators cut off McComb’s microphone. She didn’t tell a dirty joke. She didn’t curse. She didn’t insult her classmates or her teachers. Brittany McComb committed the egregious sin of attempting to thank God and Jesus. “I went through four years of school at Foothill and they taught me logic and they taught me freedom of speech,” McComb stated. “God’s the biggest part of my life. Just like other valedictorians thank their parents, I wanted to thank my lord and savior.”

The best explanation of why our schools are failing that I’ve seen in quite a while, from blogging economist Don Boudreaux:

Government K-12 schools, as now run everywhere in the U.S., will never excel at educating students. The reason is that each school gets its students and its budget without having to compete for them.

Imagine if, say, supermarkets were run the same way we run schools. Everyone in my county would pay taxes to fund the county supermarket system; each one of us would then be assigned one specific county supermarket at which we are allowed to shop.

Of course, once in our assigned store, all the groceries that each of us gets are “free” — meaning, we don’t have to pay for them on the spot. If the products and services supplied by the supermarket are of poor quality, we’re not allowed to switch to other county markets; we must, instead, complain to politicians.

The managers of the supermarkets will agree that their stores offer abysmal service and undesirable products; they will assert that this sad fact is caused by underfunding. We will be warned that only by paying higher taxes will we have any possibility of getting better supermarkets.

So our taxes will rise and funding for supermarkets will increase. But quality will remain poor — and the excuses offered by the government-employed managers of the supermarkets will remain that they need yet more funding.

Technorati Tags: Education,
Failing Schools.

Who would’a thunk it? A good school program expanding as the number of school shooting teams in Memphis triples this year:

Last season, only Memphis University School and Houston High School had trap shooting clubs.

That changed when Shelby County School Board member Ron Lollar heard about the 400 scholarships set aside by the Tennessee Wildlife Federation for Tennessee high school trap team members across the state.

Lollar and County Schools Supt. Bobby Webb gathered interested coaches and sponsors to form four more teams from Arlington, Bolton, Germantown and Briarcrest high schools. To join, students must maintain a “C” average, cannot misbehave and must complete a Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency hunter’s safety course.

I always liked Ron Lollar.

And who would’a thunk it? The Commercial Appeal prints a story about kids with guns and doesn’t descend into left-wing nut-bag ranting, not even a little.

Technorati Tags: Scholastic Shooting,
Education,
Second Amendment,
Memphis,
Tennessee,
Shelby County.

The touchy-feely crowd in California was panic-stricken when voters called for teaching children in English, rather than keeping them from learning how to get along in America. But once again, the liberals were just plain wrong:

THE LATEST TEST scores of California’s English learners show that immigrant children are continuing to do well under English immersion, defying the doomsday predictions by opponents of 1998′s Proposition 227. The mandate that schools teach children “overwhelmingly” in English, rather than in their native languages, has resulted in a large, demonstrable improvement in English proficiency. …

In 2005, 47% of California’s English learners scored in the top two categories of English proficiency — “early advanced” or “advanced.” By comparison, only 25% scored in the top two categories in 2001, shortly after many school districts began eliminating their bilingual programs. That’s a remarkable improvement.

It’s time to say that to live in America you must learn English.

Technorati Tags: Education,
Immigration,
National Language,
English.

The following is the abstract from a paper posted on the Harvard University site under the section Faculty Research Working Paper Series:

In this paper, John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago’s Department of Political Science and Stephen M.Walt of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government contend that the centerpiece of U.S. Middle East policy is its intimate relationship with Israel. The authors argue that although often justified as reflecting shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives, the U.S. commitment to Israel is due primarily to the activities of the “Israel Lobby.” This paper goes on to describe the various activities that pro-Israel groups have undertaken in order to shift U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction.

Nowhere in the paper do the authors acknowledge the activities of pro-Islam groups, such as CAIR, and their efforts to shift U.S. foreign policy.

It is a one-side, myopic view of complex policy. Reviewing the actual text of the “academic” paper would lead one to think that it was written by an ambitious grade schooler. I began to fisk the article but soon realized that it would take weeks to list all the errors.

As my brother put it, “Dispicable. This passes for scholorship at Harvard.”

Technorati Tags: Harvard,
Liberal Academia.

We’ve heard for decades that American education is failing and technical jobs are being given to Asians because there aren’t enough Americans to fill the need. But then there’s this from Business Week:

Because of fuzzy definitions of “engineering graduate,” estimates of Indian and Chinese numbers can be wildly exaggerated, while America’s are understated.

Just look at the numbers using consistent criteria. If one counts people who study computer science and information technology as engineers — as India does — then the U.S. grants 134,000 four-year engineering degrees annually. Indeed, the U.S. is producing far more engineers per capita than either of Asia’s emerging superpowers. Indian schools grants only 122,000 four-year engineering degrees (and almost as many three-year degrees), while China generates 351,000.

“SPREADING PROPAGANDA.” But China’s statistics may still be inflated because the definition of an engineer can vary widely from province to province. In some cases, auto mechanics are included. “The numbers seem to include anybody who has studied anything technical,” Wadhwa says.

The bottom line is that America’s engineering crisis is a myth, Wadhwa argues.

Technorati Tags: Education,
Engineering,
Offshoring.

I took an online Zogby poll this morning. I do these every once in a while because (1) it gives some insight as to what pollsters are looking at (and thus what the media and politicians are concerned with, and from there what gets put into the American psyche) and (2) I get some fairly interesting newsletters from Zogby in return.

This morning’s poll asked:

What do you think should be the number one priority for the next congress?

• War in Iraq
• Economy
• Social security reform
• Scandals/ethics
• Environment
• US foreign policy
• Homeland security
• Tax reform
• Federal budget deficit
• Off-shoring of jobs
• Poverty
• Racial divide in the US
• Health care
• Illegal immigration
• Nothing/not sure
• Other-Specify

What is missing from this list? What domestic issue has fallen so far off the radar that it doesn’t even merit consideration?

Education.

Poverty is on the list, but if all our children were educated then poverty would be massively reduced, if not virtually eliminated.

Off-shoring of jobs is on the list, but if all our children were educated then we would be off-shoring our talent to help the developing world.

Racism is on the list, but if all our children were educated then a great deal of the causes of racism would be eliminated. Education is the key to true equal opportunity. And as the economic, political and academic segments of our society become integrated, racism melts away. The culture of victimization could not survive. There would be no more resentment from taxpayers for supporting a growing welfare state. Most importantly, you do not hate those who work work with, who help you be successful in your career, who live next to you and whose children play with yours.

If all our children were educated then the black family could grow strong again. Educated fathers tend to stay married, regardless of race. Educated girls have ambition, not babies, regardless of race.

If all our children were educated then crime would plummet. Tax revenues would be raised hand over fist. Everyone would have health care that they choose, not that the government tries to provide.

Some may say I’m being racist by stating things in a stereotypical manner. Some may say I’m oversimplifying. But none can sway me from the position that we are cheating our children and weakening our country’s future because we are failing to address this problem.