Hostile Takeover: Resisting Centralized Government's Stranglehold on America (29 page)

The national price tag to educate one student for one year averaged $10,499 in 2009—a 2.3 percent increase over the previous year.
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Public schools collectively spend a whopping $605 billion every year. Several states spend more than $15,000 per student every year, including New York ($18,126), Washington ($16,408), New Jersey ($16,271), Alaska ($15,552), and Vermont ($15,175).
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Pennsylvania taxpayers pay $14,420 per student, yet only about half of eleventh graders are proficient in math and reading.
24
,
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The dollar amounts are even more staggering in inner-city schools. Los Angeles spends more than $25,000 per student. However, only 10 percent of black male eighth graders are proficient in reading and fewer than 1 percent are advanced readers. Only 41 percent of black males end up graduating from high school in Los Angeles.
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New York City spends about $21,500 per student,
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but more than two-thirds of fourth-grade students and three-fourths of eighth graders in New York City are not proficient in math or reading.
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Education spending has skyrocketed over the past few decades. After adjusting for inflation, total education expenditures per pupil are nearly two and a half times higher today than in 1970.
29
But has the increased spending improved academic achievement? Of course not. For instance, reading and math scores for seventeen-year-olds have remained stagnant for four decades. Science scores for these seventeen-year-olds have slightly declined since 1970.
30

Compare that to what happens with private spending. Washington, D.C., spends an average of $28,170 per student annually, yet only 12 percent of eighth graders are proficient in reading, only 8 percent in math.
31
,
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Meanwhile, the average tuition for a private school in Washington, D.C., is about $10,000
less
than what the public schools spend, per pupil.
33

THE UNION LABEL

W
HERE IS ALL THE MONEY GOING, IF IT’S NOT BEING USED TO IMPROVE
educational outcomes? To government employees. The number of public school employees has exploded. The ratio of staff to students has gone up by 70 percent since 1970. Concurrently, the number of teachers’ union members has increased by an incredible 4.5 million people,
34
even as unions nationwide have continued to bleed membership.
35
Why hasn’t the hiring of more public school staff improved academic achievement for students? Well, to whom do public employees answer?

Teachers’ unions exist to protect teachers, not students. Government employees are “the customer” in a top-down school system. And the customer is always right. As Albert Shanker, the late president of the American Federation of Teachers, once put it, “When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of schoolchildren.” Shanker supporters dispute that he said this,
36
but its staying power hints of the indisputable truth at its core.

One clear goal of teachers’ unions is the hiring of more dues-paying teachers to feed the system. A total of twenty-eight states are forced-unionism states, where workers have no choice but to join if they want a job.
37
So in the majority of states, teachers in public schools are also forced to join a union and pay dues as a condition of employment. Why don’t they get a choice? The freedom to associate necessarily means also the freedom not to associate.

More teachers hired means more dues-paying members. The more dues-paying members, the more money for the union bosses. The money is invested in politics, to pump more taxpayer dollars into the system and maintain the status quo by blocking any meaningful educational reforms—so as to keep up the number of dues-paying members. It’s a business.

When it comes to raw political muscle, two national education unions, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA), are formidable forces. Since 1990, the NEA has contributed more than $30 million to Democrats (82 percent of its total), while the AFT has contributed more than $28 million to Democrats (91 percent of its total).
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Regardless of political affiliation, few state or federal legislators are willing to risk provoking the unions, in order to push through the needed fixes to our broken school system.

These unions strongly oppose education tax credits, school vouchers, merit pay, charter schools, or, for that matter, any meaningful educational reform. As former top officials at the NEA’s Kansas and Nebraska state chapters now admit, “The NEA has been the single biggest obstacle to education reform in this country. We know because we worked for the NEA.”
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BAD APPLES

T
HE UNIONS’ GREATEST ACHIEVEMENT FOR TEACHERS—TENURE—IS
among the worst things perpetrated on students. Public school teachers typically get tenure after they have taught for only three years,
40
practically guaranteeing educators a job for life. Teachers’ unions have imposed these burdensome rules to ensure that all teachers keep their jobs, no matter what. After all, as we’ve seen, an employed teacher is a dues-paying teacher, and the teacher (not the parent) is the union’s customer, and the customer is always right. Parents come and go, kids age out, but a (tenured) teacher is forever.

It is almost impossible to fire a bad teacher because of how costly and time-consuming unions have made the process. In major cities, only 1 out of 1,000 teachers is fired for performance-related reasons.
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In Chicago, for instance, only 28.5 percent of eleventh graders in Chicago are proficient in reading and math, but only 0.1 percent of teachers were dismissed for bad performance between 2005 and 2008.
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Something doesn’t add up here.

Some school districts have nearly given up. Over the past three years, New York City has fired only 88 out of about 88,000 school teachers for poor job performance.
43
That’s better job security than even incumbent members of Congress enjoy. Instead of attempting the long and costly process of firing a bad teacher, New York City used to put these teachers in so-called “rubber rooms.” At any given time, about 700 New York City schoolteachers were paid not to teach. They sat all day in the rubber rooms and read magazines and chatted. These teachers didn’t do any work and still drew full salaries, at a cost to New York taxpayers of $20 million a year.
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The rubber rooms were ended after taxpayers got wind of the practice. Now New York City teachers accused of wrongdoings are assigned to do administrative work or “nonclassroom” duties. But the dismissal process for bad teachers has not improved. On average, a failing New York City teacher, when successfully fired, will have spent nineteen months in the disciplinary process.
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It cost an average of $163,142 to fire one teacher in New York City, according to
Education Week.
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The costs and legal hoops associated with firing a teacher prevent school districts from getting rid of the bad apples, even if they are accused of inappropriate behavior with a student. It took six years to fire one New York City teacher who admitted to exchanging sexually explicit e-mails with a sixteen-year-old student. Even though he didn’t teach during those six years, he still got paid more than $350,000.
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It took four years and $283,000 to fire a New Jersey teacher who hit kids.
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The news is filled with disgusting stories of teachers sexually assaulting or physically abusing students. It shouldn’t take several years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to get them out of the classroom and off the taxpayers’ dime.

Public schools have many great teachers who are model educators. These teachers go the extra mile to inspire and enrich the lives of their students. Great teachers should be rewarded for all their hard work. Private-sector companies generally give bonuses and salary increases to excellent employees. Why should teaching be an exception? Yet it is often just as difficult to reward good teaching as it is to punish poor performance.

As Friedman wrote in 1962, “With respect to teachers’ salaries, the major problem is not that they are too low on the average—they may well be too high on the average—but that they are too uniform and rigid. Poor teachers are grossly overpaid and good teachers grossly underpaid.”
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Yet union rules often dictate that teacher raises be based on seniority rather than actual performance.

NO BUREAUCRAT LEFT BEHIND

J
IMMY
C
ARTER CREATED THE
D
EPARTMENT OF
E
DUCATION IN 1977 AS
a political quid pro quo for the teachers’ unions’ endorsement the previous year.
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Over the last thirty-plus years, unions have continued to pump money into Democratic political gains, and the money has provided a substantial return on their investment. For Democrats, federal interference in education is now an article of faith.

Education was not considered by the Founders to be a federal responsibility, and it is not specifically listed in the Constitution. It should be left to the states and the people, in accordance with the Tenth Amendment. Eliminating the Department of Education
used
to be a standard Republican talking point. Ronald Reagan ran on abolishing it in the early ’80s. For years after he left office, it remained GOP orthodoxy. The 1996 GOP platform declared: “The Federal government has no constitutional authority to be involved in school curricula or to control jobs in the market place. This is why we will abolish the Department of Education, end federal meddling in our schools, and promote family choice at all levels of learning.”
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But after the government shutdown fight of 1995 and 1996, Republicans began to lose stomach for the task and no more was heard of abolishing Jimmy Carter’s Education Department. By 2001, President George W. Bush had partnered with Ted Kennedy to enact a massive expansion of the Department of Education’s funding and reach. The legislation—No Child Left Behind—
was passed in a bipartisan fashion
.

The U.S. Department of Education is, at best, a counterproductive waste of money. Like all federal agencies and virtually everything government does, federal education spending costs taxpayers dramatically more than initially predicted. The department’s 2011 budget is nearly six times greater than its first. It has increased from $13.1 billion (in 2007 dollars) in 1980 to $77.8 billion in 2011.
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All that money to prove what we already know: that a group of federal bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., cannot possibly design a curriculum that meets the unique needs of the millions of individual schoolchildren across the nation.

Just ask the parents. Only 55 percent of parents whose children attend an assigned public school reported being “very satisfied” with their child’s education (and satisfaction is far lower in inner-city public schools), compared to 82 percent of parents whose children attend a private, nonreligious school.
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We have tried top-down management of education for a generation. We’ve tried top-down union control. The test was taken; the results posted. Government monopoly schools have failed to make the grade. We need to try a bottom-up approach, one that restores control over education to the local level, where parents are put back in charge.

Parents and students should be free to choose a secular or religious school, a traditional or progressive school, an arts school or one focused on technology. Where there is market demand, options will be supplied. A one-size-fits-all educational approach in public schools meets no one’s particular needs. Every individual child is unique. Each has a different learning style and interests, which the centralized model either fails to recognize or is incapable of responding to.

Throwing more money at the problem is not the solution. Hiring more teachers hasn’t increased educational outcomes. Schools are not “out of money,” as the education establishment would have us believe. The solution is to break down the centralization of control. The union monopoly has to go. So does the Department of Education. So does No Child Left Behind, with all its mandates and meddling and throwing good money after bad.

THE CORRECT ANSWER IS FREEDOM

W
HY SHOULDN’T PARENTS BE FREE TO CHOOSE?
S
CHOOL CHOICE PROGRAMS
grant parents more control over their child’s education, empowering them to choose the best educational option for their child. Just as competition and choice has improved everyday products, school choice produces better-performing schools. Two of the most popular proposals are school vouchers and education tax credits.

It was in fact Milton Friedman, while a professor at the University of Chicago, who first introduced the idea of school vouchers. As he wrote in
Capitalism and Freedom,
“The parent who would prefer to see money used for better teachers and texts rather than coaches and corridors has no way of expressing this preference except by persuading a majority to change the mixture for all. This is a special case of the general principle that a market permits each to satisfy his own taste—effective proportional representation; whereas the political process imposes conformity.”
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Since he proposed the revolutionary idea in 1955, school vouchers programs have been implemented in a handful of states, despite what can only be termed
unyielding
resistance from teachers’ unions and the political establishment. Parents are granted a voucher worth a predetermined amount of money to help them pay for the school of their choice. School vouchers have boosted student achievement, graduation rates, and parental satisfaction. In state after state, freedom is working.