RH Jones, Beacon-Journal: Leave education to the Pros

From RH Jones, August 31, 2007
Subject: Leave education to the pros

Re: My editorial printed in the Akron Beacon Journal of 08/31/07 “Voice of the People”, page A8:
http://www.ohio.com/editorial/vop/9488117.html

Leave education to the Pros

Ohio’s public school districts have checks and balances not available in charter, private, religious or home schooling.

In our representative government, school board members, elected on both the state and local levels, control the school districts for the people. They represent the stakeholders with their varying perspectives. Consensus is reached in board meetings through the democratic process of the majority vote.

Boards do the hiring and firing of employees and decide when more funding is needed to keep payrolls steady with inflation, to compete for the best employees and to maintain school infrastructure. Then they go to the public for revenues. The voters decide whether or not they want to support public education.

Parents have freedom of choice and enroll their children in the best school districts they can afford. On voter approval, federal and state revenues are sent to the poorer districts for supplemental funding. Although not entirely flawless, as any human endeavor is not, this method of free education for America’s children has created a nation that is the envy of the world.

Conversely, a totally free-market, entrepreneurial public education system would eliminate checks and balances on public expenditures. Furthermore, there would be no checks and balances by sending the money directly to the parents.

A suitable environment for special-education students and the gifted would be nonexistent. There would be no school buses, no free books and libraries and no health or social services for students. Student and teacher rights would be without due process.

Probably the dastardliest consequence of total free marketing would be fraud. Individual cases would paralyze the court system, and, as in business, executive salaries would skyrocket.

In the past, before the super-rich power brokers found they could further line their pockets with public-school funds, American schools educated those who wanted an education. Education is, therefore, best left to the college-trained professional educators and the freely elected public school district boards of education that employ them.

Robert Hudson Jones,
Norton