Guest Opinion: Politics impede education reform

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

By George R. Harris

We live in a world where you can choose from any of 40 different kinds of cereal or buy one of dozens of car makes and models. But in our education system you must go to the little red schoolhouse on the corner unless you are rich.

In l983, “A Nation at Risk” was published. It described in detail the serious failures of American K-through-12 public education. The authors believed that calling attention to the problem would cause the education establishment to self-correct the problems described. A Coret Report issued 20 years later concluded that this assumption was erroneous and that the state of education had further deteriorated.

The trend continues as our children fall farther behind the education levels attained in other developed nations, notwithstanding the fact that we are spending three times as much as we were in the l960s, measured in l960 dollars. New Jersey cities are spending almost $20,000 per child with no noticeable improvement. The drop-out rate there, as throughout American cities, continues to be roughly 50 percent, with a large percentage of graduates leaving 12th grade without a grasp of the basic skills.

The builders of prisons decide to build jails based on the number of fourth graders who cannot read. Our jail population is the largest in the world in both absolute terms and per capita. The economic and social cost of creating a hard-core underclass of minority blacks and Latinos will inexorably lead to consequences too grave to even contemplate. All the polls show that these minority populations want the right to remove their children from these failed government schools, but their political leaders have been too influenced by union money and power to fight for the needs of their constituents.

Lines of children wait for acceptance into charter schools, and the anguish on the faces of mothers whose children are not selected is painful to behold, for these mothers know the odds are their child will go to jail and probably die young. These alternative schools are few in number. To take the example of one such school – the YES School in Houston, comprised of 1,000 low-income Latino children – a condition of graduation is acceptance into a four-year college. All of the seniors achieve this goal. I would ask you to think twice when people tell you poor children cannot be taught, cannot overcome a background of poverty, that their mothers do not care.

The excuses given by the education establishment are fundamentally inaccurate and the system is run by and for the benefit of national unions and others who have vested interests in this $500 billion industry. The interests of children, parents and taxpayers are not the interests that drive this establishment. In some states, the number of administrators is greater than the number of teachers. The administration’s overload is so oppressive that many of our best teachers feel compelled to leave. At the behest of educators, large foundations, the government and various individuals have spent tens of billions of dollars trying to make this system work.

Schools that impact the great majority of America’s children function under a system of tenure. Twenty-four-year-olds are effectively guaranteed a job for life, all promotions are based on seniority, and accountability is not a consideration. I would ask all of you who have any experience in the private sector how well you could run a business where you could not fire anyone and all pay raises were based on seniority alone. This system is being changed throughout the world, but, alas, not in America, for the political power of the owners of the system has been too great to challenge.
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