The Choice Channel

“Hardly anyone disputes the contention that the modern public school is seriously flawed. Test scores continue to be poor while metal detectors are found in the more violent schools. Welfare-state liberals argue that schools in poor areas need more money to place them on an equal footing with their richer counterparts. Conservatives usually reply that the solution is a voucher system that would break the government monopoly on education by restoring choice and control to parents. But virtually all participants on both sides of the debate concede the nobility of the original reformers; in their view, the ‘good intentions’ of such school champions as Horace Mann and John Dewey led to ‘unintended consequences.’” (07/98)

http://tinyurl.com/5wsmcj

“The tax code has always allowed various deductions and credits for investment in physical capital. But there have been few incentives to make comparable investments in human capital - expanding the productive capacity of human beings. In a step toward rectifying this discrepancy, the tax law passed last summer allows a child’s parents or others to set up an education savings account (ESA) to help pay tuition and other expenses at a public or private college. While contributions to ESAs are not tax-deductible, the interest earned accumulates tax free and withdrawals for education expenses are not taxed.” (10/97)

http://www.ncpa.org/ba/ba244.html

“Something happened the other day at the learning center where I work, something that I had never before witnessed. A young lady of about fifteen stood up, told the attending floor teacher that she wasn’t ‘going to do this anymore’ — and then walked straight out the door into the reception area, where she waited until her parents picked her up. Working one-on-one with another student at the time, I didn’t involve myself in the situation, nor have I inquired about it since. Only a few things could have happened. The center director might have met with the young lady and her parents and a) convinced them that she should stay in the program, or b) failed to so convince them. Alternatively, the director, deciding that the girl’s disruptive presence was not worth whatever the parents were paying, could have just called and told them that she was not welcome back. One thing, however, would not have happened: the student would not have been compelled to return by force of law (that is, the law and rule of force).” (07/03)

http://tinyurl.com/47qr88

“Academic standards are all the rage. Nearly everyone thinks they are the key to improving the dismal state of American education. The nation’s governors recently affirmed their intention to hold the children of their states to high standards. President Clinton supported the governors’ position when he told them, ‘If you want the standards movement to work, first you have to do the hard work of defining what it is you expect children to learn.’ That is the essence of the standards movement. Some level of government will dictate to children (and their parents) what’s expected of them. There may be debate over which level of government should do the dictating but not over whether some government should be doing it.” (06/96)

http://tinyurl.com/6avots

“Most Americans have always been passionately devoted to education. The current national panic over our plummeting learning scores is only the latest sign of this devotion and is remarkably similar to the panics over purported education crises that have occurred throughout U.S. history. Unfortunately, almost all of the politicians and so-called expert educationalists rushing forward to solve this latest education crisis seem to have forgotten the simplest facts about the early history of American education, which enabled this country to produce far more than its share of the world’s most creative thinkers. This ignorant panic is inspiring a headlong rush into the central planning and bureaucratization of education that have been increasingly destroying the effectiveness of U.S. education for over 40 years.” (1991)

http://tinyurl.com/yp62p4

“A recent book claims that the crisis in government school systems has been manufactured by the enemies of public education. Authors David C. Berliner and Bruce J. Biddle think the widespread concern about what goes on in the schools is based on myth. Judge for yourself. At a school in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, 50 girls were compelled to submit to genital examinations against their will and without the knowledge of their parents. When the girls tried to leave the room, a nurse block their way. When one demanded to be allowed to call her mother, she was refused. In response to parents’ complaints, the school district said that no rule was violated. The local police said the examinations broke no law.” (05/96)

http://www.fff.org/comment/ed0596b.asp

“During the Cold War, the great powers competed to prove their superiority in the field of education, and on that very level communism suffered its greatest defeat. The reform of education in short or long intervals was the goal of all the countries in the world, big or small, developed or developing, capitalist or former socialist. It became a matter of real necessity for the educational system to incorporate programme improvements, i.e., innovations performed constantly in certain time intervals, updated with recent achievements in science, technics and technology. The reform of education was, not without good reasons, dramatically introduced in some places as a question of national independence and survival. This was the case, first of all in the developing countries.” (09/03/04)

http://www.libertyforall.net/?p=1217

“The latest fight on the nation’s bloody educational battlefield is over the newly released national standards for teaching history to America’s schoolchildren. The standards were drawn up by the federally funded National Center for History in the Schools at the University of California, Los Angeles. They are part of Goals 2000, the program passed by Congress to create a common curriculum for the entire country. Everything about the history standards has been predictable. The 271-page document calls for emphasis on sometimes obscure events involving women and African Americans but leaves out Paul Revere, Robert E. Lee, Wilbur and Orville Wright, and Thomas Edison. Understanding the changing gender roles seems more important to the authors of the standards than the historical struggle against political tyranny, culminating in the American Revolution, or the struggle of man’s intellect against nature.” (07/95)

http://www.fff.org/freedom/0795z.asp

“The thrust of this paper concerns the blatantly undemocratic American practice of forcing young people into governmentally controlled institutions of learning, colloquially known as schools. What is at stake in the debate over compulsory schooling is nothing less than access to the same defining democratic right that the authors of The Constitution clearly recognized as the foundation from which a truly free society is spawned: the individual right to the pursuit of Happiness. Intrinsically imbedded within the pursuit of Happiness is the right to freely pursue knowledge. Mandatory schooling violates, to the highest degree, the autonomy of the individual to seek and define knowledge for him/herself. Parents are stripped of the basic right to decide the fashion and context their children are to learn about the world.” (12/00)

http://tinyurl.com/2vou5b

“In the latest attempt to reform the public schools, President Clinton is calling for national educational standards and national testing of public school students. But Joseph A. Califano, president National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, said that national standars won’t do any good because of all the drugs in public schools. A survey recently conducted by Califano’s center found that drugs were more common in public schools than in the surrounding neighborhood. Forty-one percent of the high school students surveyed said that they had seen drugs sold at their school. ‘Until we get drugs out of our schools, we’re not going to have the kind of quality education that everybody dreams about,’ said Mr. Califano.” (08/97)

http://www.fff.org/comment/ed0897c.asp