Posted by
Jack Fisher on Thursday, June 25, 2009 7:55:38 AM
Over two years ago, ABC's John Stossel did a 20/20 special on education called "Stupid in America." The title was thought to be a little extreme, but it was later revealed to be entirely appropriate when dealing with education policy in America. But it isn't just referring to the students who continually rank lower than the rest of the Western world on standardized tests. More so, "Stupid in America" reflects the failure and outright arrogance of the system itself.
Stupid In America
But as hard hitting an assessment this program is, it is only recently that some of the dirty secrets of public schooling has come to light. This past week, the Associated Press did a story on the infamous 'rubber rooms' first described in the 20/20 special. In these rooms, troubled teachers are placed in rooms where they just sit around and do nothing all day and still collect their full salary. Why are they there? The reasons vary. Some are there due to insubordination on the job while others are there for serious offences like sexually harassing students. While such behavior would earn a quick firing in any other job, it doesn't work that way in a public government run school system that is heavily unionized. Because of union contracts, these teachers CAN'T be fired so in order to keep them from the students, the system just puts them away and keeps paying them until they can go through all the messy bureaucracy it takes to fire them.
700 Teachers Paid To Do Nothing
This is government programs at their worst. Never in the private sector would something like this be allowed. Any company that put troubled employess in these situations and kept paying them would go out of business in short order. It is only through a government run system where taxpayer dollars flow freely through endless bureaucracy that these egregious practices can propogate.
But despite this story and the two-year-old special done on 20/20, there is no serious talk to change the system. Barack Obama has talked about making education affordable and available to all people, but he has offered no substantive solutions on doing so. He has not talked about allowing private schooling to grow (even though he sends his own kids to private school) and he has not talked about taking on the teachers unions. In other words, these rubber rooms will be here to stay.
Now as someone with public school still fresh in my memory, I can attest how lousy it is. I was lucky to attend a fairly nice school in a good community, but it still felt like a government run internment center for teenagers and youths. I never got the sense that people wanted to be there, let alone enjoyed being there. But the worst part was the feeling of powerlessness and the total lack of choice. Nobody was allowed to really take control of their educational pursuit. Everybody had to jump through the same hoops. It was only when I got to the more open environments of college and the workplace that I learned so much more. To this day I see much of my public school career as mostly a waste of time.
In a free society where the government is limited by law, these sorts of endeavors are an affront to freedom. The government should not be in the business of education. It is in the business of protecting rights. Time and again the system's failures are exposed. But government continues to drag its feet, avoiding any real change in favor of bureaucrats.