Got an Education Reform Idea? Too bad.

Mark Knapp in Federal Way writes about his ideas to reform education. Don’t get me wrong, they’re very good ideas I wish our districts would adopt, but I hate to break the news to him: these kinds of things will never happen.

Why? It’s simple. Education is a political football, just like senior care. Politicians use it to raise money and get elected. The teacher’s unions across our country use it to fatten their paychecks and accomplish their ends. Once a thing becomes a political football, we voters are just strung along, our emotions abused, and we never see what we hope.

The solution is rather simple: Take the football out of the hands of the politicians. That would mean putting the school board, the local residents, businesses, and parents, in complete control of education in their area. With the football firmly in the hands of the people that actually care about the issue, things will happen when they need to happen.

How do we get there from here? First, we have to stop funding education with federal dollars. This gives the federal government some of the political football, because they control how much money is spent and how that money is spent. If the federal government were firm in giving nothing to education, the teacher’s unions, the education reformists, and the politicians wouldn’t even think of going to Washington DC to accomplish their end.

What needs to happen next is getting the state governments out of education. I understand that people feel like we need to tax people in Spokane to fund education in Tacoma, but the problem is that you get into a budget fight in the state house rather than in the schools across the state. The same problem that involving the federal government applies to state governments as well.

State governments should provide the legal constructs that districts need to raise their own money, but I don’t believe they should handle the money at all. State politicians should be focused on state issues, not local issues like schools. It makes no more sense to have the legislature work on zoning issues than to have the counties and cities work on the state budget.

One of the arguments against this kind of broad reform is that people are too stupid to manage their own school. The classic case is the poor single black mother. I think this idea is idiotic, misanthropic, and at worst, racist. There is no person more devoted to education reform than the parents of the poorest kids in our schools. They know that the only hope for their kids is to get smart and get off the street, and they know the only way that can happen is with school reform. Politicians may tinker at reform to get votes and money, but they are not in the same situation as a poor, black single mother in the nation’s poorest and most crime-ridden areas. In a common saying, who’s the chickens and who’s the pigs? Which do you think cares more about what’s for breakfast?

Our nation has a history of being #1 in education. The reason why we were is because poor, uneducated farmers and members of the lowest classes in our inner cities ran our schools. They might not have know much about what it takes to hire good teachers or build good schools, but they were motivated more than any other to see to it that those things happened to their kids.

So, my message to any education reformer: If you really want to reform education, you need to change the system fundamentally. Get politicians out of the mix, meaning, get education out of government and into the hands of the people who care about it most.

Taking Names of Criminal Teachers

The judge in the case asked for names of teachers who failed to comply with his order. This is to keep the innocent separate from the guilty. On Monday, the district will likely comply with that request.

We don’t know what the judge has in mind yet for penalties, probably a fine. I doubt, at this point, we’ll see anyone thrown in jail, although it remains a possibility.

The negotiations appear to be hung up on three points: teacher salary, classroom size, and seniority.

The district is running with less money per student than it had last year. This is because of the democratic legislature, which has been incapable of balancing the budget without cutting school funding, or in relaxing regulations so that schools can shift their budgets into teacher salaries.

Demanding one fewer student per class means that the district will need more teachers per student. This means they have to spend more money on teachers and the costs of supporting a teacher. If you want to reduce classroom size, you either have to bring in new money or reduce the cost per teacher. The Tacoma Education Association doesn’t seem to understand this.

The district would like to send the best teachers where they are needed the most. The Tacoma Education Association wants teachers to choose where they should go based on how long they’ve been around. I don’t know why the TEA cares. I’ve never understood why unions care how people are assigned. I can only think it is to not allow the best teachers to get the best assignments. Or maybe it’s so they can carefully distribute the union agitators among the schools. Any insight into why they are sticking to this point is helpful. It’s obvious that they don’t have the interest of the kids at heart on this point.

The state is facing another massive budget shortfall. The Democratic Party is incapable of balancing a budget and keeping it balanced. It is very likely that the democrats will, once again, take money out of education to support their pet re-election projects. They believe that the voters will approve tax hikes if they are cutting funding to the most important services, rather than streamlining government.

It’s clear now that the union is NOT negotiating in good faith with the district. They intend to strike, and keep striking, until they believe the taxpayers will approve tax hikes in our state. They chose Tacoma because Tacoma is a large district with a lot of visibility. The fact that they came to a table regressing to a previous proposal is a sign of this.

I hope the district does what is right and starts holding hiring interviews. They should contact the neighboring school districts and ask for as many substitute teachers as possible at the same time. Those teachers who fail to show up to work need to be fired for insubordination.

Perhaps we’ll be a union-less district when this is all said and done. I hope and pray it is so. There is no other condition whereby I’ll send my kids to the Tacoma School District again.

These are NOT the Teachers I Want to Teach My Kids

The Tacoma Education Association voted today to defy a direct and clear court order that ordered the teachers back to school because state law is quite clear on the topic.

Members of the school board, I do not want a bunch of criminals who violate our laws and our courts to teach our kids. Please fire all of them who voted in favor of continuing the strike, and all those who voted in favor of the strike. While you’re at it, fire those who did not show up this morning.

The strike is going to take months to resolve anyway. You can hire an entirely new staff in the same time, made up of members of our community who do not break our laws and defy our judges.

Should Criminals Teach Your Kids?

The behavior of the Tacoma Education Association, the Tacoma teacher’s union, shows why members of that union are unfit to teach our children.

Defying common sense, they demanded a pay raise and a smaller class size when such things are economically impossible. Defying the law of our state, they declared a strike. And now, defying a direct court order, many teachers failed to show up to work today.

This makes the Tacoma Education Association a criminal organization. The difference between this group and the mafia is one of degrees. When the Tacoma Education Association decided that the law doesn’t apply to them, or that they are exempt while others are not, they entered the same realm that criminals and criminal organizations exist within.

Do you want criminals teaching your kids?

The question is now for what we should do about this.

For starters, the union should be disbanded. This is rather simple thing to do. The school board simply stops negotiating with them. The school board simply hires teachers one at a time, without a union contract. This means they deduct nothing for the union. If the teachers really, really want a union, they can form one themselves, but the school board will not negotiate with it.

Second, the teachers who are responsible for the breaking of the law should be fired and never allowed to teach again. Those teachers who failed to report to work this morning have lost all rights and privileges of being called a teacher. Anyone who thinks they are qualified to teach little children are not thinking straight.

Third, criminal punishment should be sought for those who disobeyed the law. That is probably going to be no more than a few weeks of jail time for defying a court order, but it may also involve some additional penalties.

Finally, we should file a civil suit against the teachers union and the teachers, citing damages they caused by disrupting our schedule and by negotiating in bad faith with the school board.

I doubt any of these things will happen. In the real world, when employees of a company behave this way, the company goes under and people end up losing their houses and cars, and sometimes people even go to jail. In the public sector, the taxpayer ends up footing the bill for the irresponsibility on both sides.

Moses and Representative Democracy

The Founding Fathers did not, as many suppose, build our government in the principles that built Rome and Athens. Instead, they looked to these great societies as counter-examples, the same way you look at the drunk in the ditch and say, “That’s why I never drink alcohol.”

The examples that our Founding Fathers used for our government came from two governments we no longer discuss in our public education system: The Saxons and the Israelites.

The Saxon system resembles almost exactly the system that the Israelites had under Moses until the diaspora. That system is beautifully summarized in the Bible, should anyone care to read about it.

First and foremost, is the idea that God reserved the land for all. That is, the land doesn’t belong to one person or one family. It belongs to the people. This is made clear because God never gave the land of Israel to Moses. He specifically divided up the land into 12 tribes based solely on the number of people in those tribes, with subdivisions according to the children of the 12 sons of Israel.

The world, and all of its land, is the heritage of all the people. Our Lord is God, and no one else. We should follow God’s commandment and possess our land. Buying and owning land outright, debt-free, should be one of our top priorities if we want to be free.

Next, Moses commanded the people to choose wise men, men of understanding, men who people know. These he made rulers. Here is the pattern: The people choose their own rulers. Yes, rulers. You cannot have freedom in anarchy. You need rulers to make things work. Who choose your rulers? You do, not God. This is made abundantly clear throughout the Bible. When the people of Israel choose to have a king, God has his prophet Samuel explain to the people why they don’t want a king, but God nevertheless allows them to have a king after he failed to convince them.

What’s interesting is that in the king, the people wanted God to choose their leader. The Law of Moses, or the ideal government that God established for the people of Israel had the people choose their rulers. Is it not paradoxical that God wants to remove himself from the government, and leave the power to choose with the people? No, because our God is a God of liberty and free will, independence and individual responsibility. He wants us to fully own up to our own decisions, and have no one to blame but ourselves when things go wrongly.

God’s government is a government of local, elected representatives. There are captains of tens, and fifties, and hundreds and thousands. These represent their respected groups in higher and higher councils. This is very similar to the system our Saxon ancestors, politically speaking, had.

Then God established for them the manner of rule. These judges and officers were not to be a respecter of persons, but to judge each matter in the law. They were not to avoid large or small cases, treating all alike. We see this council repeated throughout the Bible. One of Jesus’ admonitions was to the judges to hear the case of the widow, the most humble member of society.

What about matters that cannot be settled? Those are moved up to higher and higher judges, who make rulings that affect larger and larger groups of people.

I think that we are doing our children a disservice, and ensuring that our liberty will not continue, because we fail to teach our kids the simple principles of liberty found in history. One of the reasons for this is, I believe, the war against the Bible. Apparently, anything you find in the Bible is not appropriate to teach in school, because we must have a separation between church and state. So, telling kids to treat each other fairly, obey the law and not be a respecter of persons, or to show charity to all is off-limits. Or it’s okay as long as you don’t use the same words that are used in the King James Version, or don’t say things like, “That’s what Isaiah said” or “That’s what Jesus taught”.

Should we persist in this mindset, I perceive a day when we cannot even mention any historical fact that the Bible mentions, and cannot teach any Christian doctrine found in the Bible, including such simple ideas such as the fact that the laws of nature apply to all in perfect justice. That would be a sad day.

 

I Fired the Tacoma Teachers Union

Today is the first day of the teacher’s strike here in Tacoma.

Today is also the last day my five children will ever attend public school, as long as there is any kind of teachers union in place.

I fired the teachers union.

In addition, I am going to do whatever I can to break the union.

A free and beneficial education system is run by parents, for the children, through their representatives on the school board. Teachers, administrators, janitors, and lunch ladies are all a means to that end. They are hired by the consent of the parents, at the whim of the parents. They answer to the parents, and no other authority. What right do they think they have to hold our kids hostage?

The union could not exist were it not for their support from the state and federal governments. Remove that, and the unions will disappear.

This means the days of having our state and federal governments involved in public education is over. Our kids and our kid’s education is not a political prop. They are not negotiating chips. They are not going to be used as an item in a presidential debate ever again. The roles of defending our rights with force has nothing to do with educating our children. The government has no more right to be involved in education than they have in determining what we can eat, or what clothes we can wear, or what words we choose to use.

Our kids are the primary and only reason for our existence. Were it not for our kids, our entire world would be meaningless and void. If you believe in evolution, or God, or whatever, you will logically conclude the same. The propagation of our species, the sanctity of life, are one and the same.

The Virtues of Homeschooling in the Internet Age

One of the most unique and impressive features of the American education system has nothing to do with our government. It has to do with the people, and the rights most states protect.

The right I am speaking of is the right to raise our children the way we think is best for them. And the feature is homeschooling.

Homeschooling is the perfect solution to the vast majority of problems that our children face in our schools. It is also the answer to our budgetary problems in our states and federal systems. If you can’t see why, then answer me this: who is a better teacher, the parents or bureaucrats?

If you think bureaucrats can do a better job at educating a child, then by all means, drop your own children off at school and don’t worry a wink because there’s nothing you can do to help.

If you know that parents are the critical component to education, then you understand why there are parents swarming the elementary schools in our nation. Parents do not trust government bureaucrats to do their jobs, because educating a child is much different than what bureaucrats can do.

The wonderful self-organizing spirit that Americans possess, almost unique among the nations of this earth, is evidence in the homeschooling industry. I feel safe in saying that even those parents who have had little or no education can find the resources they need to become the best teachers possible for their own children for free.

One of the major technological innovations that has changed the landscape of education altogether, and will make schools a relic of the past is the internet. Today, it doesn’t matter who you are, you have access to experts in any field. You don’t need subscriptions to journals and magazines to get the latest information, you don’t need to spend a single dollar on an encyclopedia set, and you don’t have to look more than 10 minutes to find someone willing to lecture on or demonstrate almost any subject.

Homeschooling works when the child is allowed to learn at the pace they are comfortable with. We already know that people learn best when they see a need for that knowledge. Rather than trying to bring the factory-like conditions of the school home, parents are better off letting children learn the same way adults working in the high-tech industry learn. Let them find their own interests. It doesn’t matter the field, eventually they’ll understand the need to read, write, and do math. With that relevant interest, they’ll be much more motivated to learn.

As I watch the series “Universe”, I am struck by how shallow the medium of TV really is. If the students were able to explore these topics on their own, they would be exposed to the math behind the topics. If you truly want to understand the motion of the planets, you are going to learn about ellipses and the inverse-r-squared force of gravity. With a goal in mind, learning these topics becomes a simple matter of getting access to the facts. How hard is it to learn about inverse-r-squared laws, and the math behind them? That information is found in many places, and not just Wikipedia.

The child that learns how the inverse-r-squared laws work will likely be exposed to their application to electric and magnetic fields. If they continue that interest, eventually they will be learning college level physics, perhaps from one of the many fine lectures available from top universities on the subject.

Socrates was distrustful of writing things down, and preferred people engage in a conversation about topics. I see a day when, like in the free software industry, experts spend a considerable amount of time fielding questions in public forums rather than lecturing in front of classes of a few hundred. Eventually, the past conversations become the knowledge, there for the plucking for anyone who is willing to type a few words into Google and spend an afternoon trying to comprehend what was said. Those experts who explain things best will rise to the top, and everyone will benefit.

In this way, books, libraries, schools, and even the lecture halls at universities will become things of the past, monuments to an age when people had a hard time finding each other and communicating. Today, those who are busy learning don’t waste their time with those things.

Separation of School and State

I agree strongly with the sentiments in the following video. Sheldon Richman argues powerfully for state-free education.

My two cents: Only parents can be responsible for the education of their children. No other person, not me, not a state authority, not even a school teacher or administrator, can feel anything close to the responsibility the children’s own parents feel. In cases where the parents are negligent, the answer is not to try and substitute parenthood with something else like public education, but to bring in a new set of parents.

A free market, unfettered by government regulation and meddling politicians, would allow our society to experiment and find the best education solutions for our children. The solution will look something like the mess we have for how we get our food, our shelter, our clothing, and everything else we rely on day-to-day. If we simply allow interested parties (the parents) to participate selfishly, securing for their child the education they think they need, then competing interests will align.

A for-profit school has been taboo in our culture. Why? I cannot tell. If a school or education system provides benefits, then those who receive those benefits are willing to pay. If the cost of producing those benefits are less than the revenues received, then we should encourage the production of that education good or service. In other words, not only should we allow people to profit from education, but we should encourage it, and discourage any education system which cannot maintain itself simply by tuition or other sales of its education products.

This would mean most universities and colleges would collapse, along with almost all of the primary and secondary schools across the country. Why? Because parents would never be willing to pay full price for these services, because these services are simply not valuable enough.

More importantly, we should rebuild in our culture the idea and practice that fathers bear the primary responsibility of managing the child’s education. That education should occur principally in the home. I believe we should elevate that to the highest ideal, and then we would see fathers spend more time at home and take jobs that allow them to spend more time at home. Mothers. of course, also play a significant role in education, and should also spend as much time as possible with their children, especially when they are very young. We should stop finding ways to separate families and replace the missing parents with the state.

News from Communist Russia

The family of a political dissident who dared stand up to the political elite is being denied their academic recognition for their achievement. The project that one child, close to earning his PhD, has worked on, has all but been stolen. Inquiries by the public are met with silence, even feigning to hide behind the student’s privacy despite the fact that the student has authorized the university to expose his private matters. (link)

Sounds like communist Russia, right? But it’s happening here in the US, at Oregon State University.

I was challenged to listen to the other side of the story last time I wrote about this. When the other side is silent, there is nothing to listen to.

If OSU can defend itself against this blatant political retaliation, let it try. As it is, they are showing us by word why no institution except the military and courts should be supported by a single taxpayer dollar.

Latest Moral Issue: School Choice

Kyle Olson compared Kelley Williams-Bolar to Rosa Parks when NPR called for his reaction to the story.

Rosa Parks, as you should remember, refused to sit in the back of the bus. At the time, black people were segregated from white people, and one of the evidences of this segregation was the fact that black people had to sit at the back of the bus. This single act of civil disobedience did not end segregation, but the millions of acts that follow did.

Kelley Williams-Bolar falsified document to make it appear that she and her daughter lived within the district of a good school. When the good school did an investigation, they uncovered the truth, and she was punished according to the law. Her motivation was to see to it that her daughter could get a good education.

Today, our education system is broken. Having the government fund and dictate education policy has completely ruined our system. Rather than apply the principles of individual liberty and moral responsibility, we have adopted the policies of government control and corruption.

Today, more than ever, we need to fight for the moral issue, which is school choice, or rather, school liberty. Rather than tax people to fund a broken education system, we need an education system where freedom is the only principle. Let people attend schools wherever they wish. Let them pay as much or as little as they want. Let teachers decide which schools they want to teach at, and let principals decide who is allowed to attend or teach.

Yes, there is terribly injustice in our country when it comes to education. This injustice arises partially because we live in a world where there is a shortage of necessary goods. The vast majority of the injustice arises because we refuse to allow market forces to distribute the limited resources according to need.

A working education system would be able to attract top talent among the teachers and administrators. A working education system would direct this top talent to where they are needed the most, or at least where they can do the most good. Although education would not be free, it would be available, which is more to say than what it is today.