The Choice Channel

“Many legislators who vote for sweeping government programs without a second thought about their constitutionality suddenly grow concerned when the issue is school vouchers. The moment a dollar of public funds crosses the threshold of a religious school, they contend, it violates ’separation of church and state.’ It is also as certain as death and taxes that whenever a school choice program is enacted, a lawsuit challenging its constitutionality will follow. With public support and evidence of success for school choice mounting by the day, the last resort for opponents is the courts.” (07/10/98)

http://www.ncpa.org/ba/ba272.html

“One of the reasons public schools don’t educate our children is that teachers spend so much time with discipline problems that they have little time left to teach. By simply not forcing the bad apples into school, those disruptive types will gladly stay away, and the learning atmosphere will improve overnight. Everyone agrees that you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. Yet the present law ignores this wisdom and tries not to just lead, but force kids into school AND make them learn. A horse that isn’t thirsty won’t drink, and a kid that isn’t interested won’t learn.” (01/96)

http://tinyurl.com/2qa2bo

“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

“Many American critics believe that the major problem with public education today is a lack of focus on results. Students aren’t expected to meet high standards, the argument goes, and the process of education takes precedence over analyzing education results in policy-making circles. This is a valid argument (as far as it goes). Indeed, it can be taken one important step further. We not only fail to hold individual students accountable for poor performance, we have also failed to hold the entire government-controlled school system accountable for its performance since at least World War II. Public education is itself a failure. Why shouldn’t individual students follow its example?” (02/93)

http://tinyurl.com/ysmrab

“The subject that I am appointed to discuss is the theory of education in the United States. This discussion has its difficulties. It brings us face to face with a good many serious disappointments. It calls for the re-examination and criticism of a good many matters which seemed comfortably settled, and which we would rather leave undisturbed. The most discouraging difficulty about this discussion, however, is that apparently it cannot lead to any so-called practical conclusion; certainly not to any conclusion, as far as I can see, which will at all answer to the general faith in machinery as an effective substitute for thought, and the general reliance upon machinery alone to bring about any and all forms of social improvement. If Socrates had come before the Athenians with some fine new piece of machinery like a protective tariff, workmen’s compensation, old-age pensions, collective ownership of the means of production, or what not; if he had told them that what they must do to be saved was simply to install his piece of machinery forthwith, and set it going; no doubt he would have interested a number of people, perhaps enough to put him in office as the standard-bearer of an enlightened and progressive liberalism.” (1931)

http://www.mises.org/story/2765

“It is one of the most ancient of human beliefs that all things human are under the influence of two contrasting forces moving in different directions. Primitive man, no doubt, early be­came aware that certain things made for salva­tion and others not: and that the division did not correspond to that represented by mere pleasure or pain. Hence, with the tendency of the dawning primitive intelligence to think of all forces as living forces, to think of winds and storms and fire and flood, as things animated like itself, there arose the notion of good and evil, of a Deity and a Devil. From the earliest twilight of our civilization this principle of contrasted forces shaping our destiny appears and reappears. In the present essay the attempt is made to show its application to the advancement of learning.” (1934)

http://tinyurl.com/2mnqko

“Charter schools are succeeding in their mission to provide an educational alternative more likely to lead to student proficiency, according to a study released today by Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby. Across the nation, charter school students are more likely to be proficient in math and reading than students in the nearest comparable regular public school. In well-established charter schools, students’ prospects of proficiency are even greater. As publicly funded schools that operate outside the regular system, charter schools can employ innovative approaches to meet student needs.” (12/04)

http://tinyurl.com/ypntet

“Imagine that you wanted to subvert the institution of the family. What would be the best way to go about it? Well, how about this?: You force parents to surrender to the state the power to make all the big decisions about their children’s education. You would make the following announcement to the parents of America: ‘Until now, you have had charge of your children’s education. But the matter is too complex in today’s world. Perhaps in a simpler time such decisions could be left to parents. But things are now more complicated. Expertise is needed. Beginning today, we, the state authorities, will determine the course of your children’s education.’” (02/96)

http://www.fff.org/freedom/0296c.asp

“While a debate rages over whether parents should be able to use tax money - or tax credits - to choose between public and private schools for their children, the movement to provide school choice to children from low-income families through privately funded vouchers is mushrooming. Thirty-six voucher programs across the nation, operating under the umbrella group Children’s Educational Opportunity Foundation of America (CEO America), pay up to half the tuition at private schools for more than 12,000 children from low-income families - with thousands more on waiting lists. … Sponsors and supporters say more affluent families can escape bad schools by enrolling their children in private schools or moving to areas with better schools.” (04/98)

http://www.ncpa.org/ba/ba265.html

“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.” (06/92)

http://tinyurl.com/yq28m6