Obama: His daughters get better education at private school than D.C.’s public ones. Can’t argue with that.

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If I were in charge of reforming schools, the first thing I would do is get rid of age-based grouping in favor of skill-level grouping and mastery promotion. Being required to master the skills before moving on would give some students more incentive to work harder. Being allowed to move on when skills were mastered would prevent brighter students from becoming bored.

Although all students probably need basic mastery of reading and math, students should also be allowed more freedom to explore individual interests and skills, such as music, art, or technology.

I would not expect all children to master the academic work necessary for college admission. On the contrary, only those who had progressed to a certain point within a reasonable amount of time would be allowed to attend the college-preparatory school. Others would either progress to unskilled labor type jobs or attend technical school, depending upon their aptitudes, interests, and motivational levels. Again, knowing that your future path depended at least in part on your accomplishments would provide an additional level of motivation for some students which does not exist under the current system.

The system I propose is closer to that used by the countries which are supposedly surpassing us in educational achievement than to our current system, and perhaps is part of the reason those countries are excelling — it puts some (or much) of the onus for success on the student.

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I honestly don’t see a problem with obama’s opinion on enrolling his daughters into a private school. I was a student that was enrolled at west ridge academy in utah. I saw the attentions that teachers have for their students are a lot better than it would be in public school. I see no problems with the president wanting to choose private schooling for his daughters.

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The free market types are always coming back to the same thing that drives every voluntary exchange in every other transaction we can look at in society. The transaction between a voluntary payer and a voluntary payee puts the payer (the customer) in the driver seat. The payee is beholden to the customer to deliver a product or service that meets their needs and their price. The customer is put in the position of decision maker and is inherently accountable for the choice they make. Every discussion about government schools brings up the same issues over and over and over and over.

Parents have no reason to truly care because they are paying far less than it costs to educate their child. They are also not the customer as they cannot take whatever money they are paying and go somewhere else with it. The schools do not have to be accountable because they cannot truly loose customers. First, parents cannot take their money and leave and if parents do leave, the government takes their money by force one way or the other. I am not wrong on any of these points.

The free market addresses all of these issues and puts the parent in charge of the buying decision which makes the service provider (the school) accountable to the parent’s needs (and the student’s).

What is so hard to understand?

You cannot “drive” this in the government school system because it will never have to function like the free market. Thinking you can get free market success in the government school system is preposterous. Any success you see in the government system is an anomily, not something that can be reproduced. There is simply no cost/price/value system in the government system because the government does not have to EARN its money. It simply steals it through taxation. Nothing improves if it does not have to in order to gain more customers or more money.

This is simple economics, but somehow everyone thinks that government can somehow defy the laws of economics because of majority vote, because the parents are “behind it 100%” or whatever other mythical concept you can dream up.

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David S, my point is that critics of public schools seem to think that by some combination of carrots and sticks – mostly sticks – they can improve the quality of the teaching force.

Perhaps it’s possible that in areas where teachers are valued, you get better teachers?

That said, unlike some people, I don’t think teachers are the sole factor influencing school quality. And it seems to me that successful urban schools, whether run by Marva Collins or by KIPP, have a couple of things in common, and the first is really strict discipline. If you’re going to have really strict discipline in your average public school, it’s going to require parental buy-in. If parents fight it, it will never work.

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I started a new blog on creating a culture of education in communities. http://closethegapculture.blogspot.com/

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Whereas Obama is right that money won’t solve many of the problems in US education, he endorses two myths. One of them is the Myth of the Missing Educational Opportunities. No, that isn’t the reason Black and Hispanic students do poorly. They do poorly because their intelligence is inferior to that of Whites and Asians. The other is the Myth of the Inadequate Teachers. Although some teachers might be less than competent, inadequate teaching isn’t the major reason for poor educational outcomes in minority districts. Again, the lower intelligence of the resident hominid youths is.

Obama probably ought not be addressed as President. He is, I think, ineligible to hold that office and occupies it in violation of our Constitution. His true legal status may be that of “illegal immigrant” and, since his first election under the false pretense of US citizenship, “felon.”

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Obama…LOL. What a loser.

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I’m not addressing whether the President is hypocritical about supporting education when his children attend a private school, because I believe the decision is not political, but in the child’s interest.

In the case of the President’s children – whether Dem or Rep – one significant concern is the Secret Service protection. Private schools may be able to accomodate such requirements more readily … and for the protection detail to be less of a distraction in that setting. Having worked with high-profile diplomats and corporate leaders, I assure you that this is an issue and drives many to private schools.

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ScienceTeacher671 – As a devout critic of government run educational systems, I am not a supporter of any carrot/stick incentive program beyond the free market. Everything we do in life we do either because we think it will benefit us or because not doing it will hurt us (yes, overly simplistic but you know what I mean). Life is a series of carrots and sticks as it were.

You are right that everyone who seems to comment on these blogs is always coming up with various carrots and sticks to try and make the government run system work. Either its standardized testing, summary firings, forcing parental involvement, truancy laws, forced property taxation, school uniforms, or whatever. The problem is that they ignore the fundamental reality of human nature.

Everyone wants parents to care, but they don’t actually pay for the cost of the school (property taxes certainly don’t cover what the state spends), they don’t get to choose the school (yes, they can move, but the school board can also move the district lines even more easily), their child cannot be kicked out for anything short of murder practically, and you know the rest. So what is the carrot for the parent. Even if they spend all the time in the world working with their child at home and everything else a good parent should do, their child still ends up back in the same school either blessed with a “good” teacher or a “bad” one in a situation they cannot control.

As for the school, until NCLB they suffered almost no consequences no matter how bad a job they did. The tax pressure and other societal structures make any serious competition almost non-existent, or certainly out of reach of the average family. Tax money is received, no matter how bad a job they do, and in fact, the standard chant when schools fail is that they need more money (and the bamboozled citizens always give it to them. I could go on for every player, but the bottom line is that there are no incentives or disincentives in the government system that could ever rival the money making, customer pleasing, voluntary choice aspects of the free market system

Carrots and sticks don’t work for anyone who doesn’t worry about ever going hungry or ever really getting hurt.

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Seems to me that vouchers would allow everyone to make a choice. Is that so bad a thing??

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@Dr. Time

What if people make the wrong choice? Or what if people all make the same choice? In theory everyone wants the best for their kids. But I think many people are ignorant to what the right choice is…or the right set of priorities, or the right paradigm. Then what? How do we help people make the right choices? That’s the question that goes deeper…deeper than our previous efforts.

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Dr.Tim – vouchers sound like a good thing on the surface. Even Milton Friedman was behind them. The key problem is that “government” money always comes with a price – generally regulations, control, requirements, etc. When you look at the problems with government schools, at the top of the list is the government bureaucracy. Hundreds of thousands are employed just to comply with regulations and everything that comes with them (paperwork, etc.). That is where a great deal of the money is wasted. If there are any positive things to be said about charter schools it is that they are able to function with far fewer regulations and rules than their traditional counterparts.

One need only look at the incessant cries from the usual suspects whenever vouchers are proposed to see what the future would look like under a voucher system. Mentions are always made about schools possibly teaching witchcraft, evangelical christianity, or whatever. That the GI bill can be used to attend Notre Dame for instance doesn’t seem to matter to these folks, but you get the picture.

The availability of easy money (and there is no other way to look at taxpayer funded vouchers) would certainly encourage many more private alternatives to start up. Most would likely have the potential for being great schools, but they will likely be burdened with ridiculous regulations and rules to the point that they will become as bad as the current government schools.

Further, those schools that wish to remain “exclusive” will simply either raise their tuition costs to account for the “free money” or not take the vouchers at all.

Excellent private alternatives who would like to remain free of the government hand would probably find themselves either out of business or seriously struggling if they chose to pass on the vouchers to retain their freedom.

Fundamentally the problem is with the financing mechanism. The government one way or the other will be taking money from everyone based soley on the value of their property, not on how many children they have in school, and that is socialism and socialism always fails.

The problem with government schools is government. Vouchers merely inject government into the private sector and that is the last thing we need in education. With vouchers they may no longer even be a private sector alternative left operating. But then that may be a motivation behind some voucher supporters.

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