TROY SENIK
Staff Writer
Thomas Jefferson spoke virtuously in 1817 as he attempted to build support for the Elementary School Act; “[We proposed a plan] to avail the commonwealth of those talents and virtues which nature has sown as liberally among the poor as rich, and which are lost to their country by the want of means for their cultivation.”
Eight years after leaving the White House, he advocated the proposal to create a universal public educational system. Very often it is Jefferson’s name that is invoked when Americans have the debate over public education, with advocates for any number of reform proposals only able to reach concord on the fact that each thinks their own design the most loyal to Jefferson’s dream of the educated citizenry that was the precondition of a functional democracy.
Yet, somehow, in an era that prides itself on efficiency and rigorously scientific solutions to public policy programs hammered out by the sort of automaton public administrators former president Woodrow Wilson envisioned, this cornerstone of American society slowly erodes, weakening the foundations of those strengths of mind and character that it is intended to buttress.
To say that the nation’s public school system is broken doesn’t seem at all adequate to the task of describing the profundity of failure that is taking place every day. The reality of the situation is that the American public education system resembles Dresden circa 1945. For those who posit that equality has been the watchword of the nation’s politics since the end of the Civil War, there can be no shortage of cognitive dissonance. This distress, emanating from a system in which school financing, contingent on revenues derived from local property taxes, systematically condemns the poorest among us to wear the invisible chains that define one’s station at birth as destiny.
There are two roads that seem promising as we attempt to overhaul education (we must remember all the while that what’s “promising” to us could be providential to our children’s generation). The first is to develop a system of charter schools which, while still public, operate outside of many of the traditional rules and regulations of public schools. Charter school would allow for schools to tailor classrooms to fit the needs of each kind of student.
The second is to institute a program of educational vouchers, in which parents are allocated a certain amount of money by the government to finance their child’s education at the school of their choice.
Thus, children’s educations are not limited because to a family financial situation that they have no control over. Vouchers function like cash, but can only be used for the purpose laid out by the government and are thus not susceptible to abuse.
These options are the best alternatives to the inefficient, bureaucratic governmental system that has eroded the public education system. So much power over someone’s children’s education shouldn’t be in the government’s hands.
Charter schools and vouchers are the best way to bring education closer what it should be; what Jefferson envisioned.
Both charter schools and vouchers have their merits and their own proclivities towards controversy, but, regardless of how you feel about either proposal, they are doubtlessly better alternatives than the singularly galling spectacle of public school teachers (and their accompanying unions) who will fight any change to an educational system that rewards failure in its educators as consistently as it fosters it in its students.
Those who decry “the end of public education” would do well to consider whether they are willing to sacrifice a generation of children on the altar of the status quo.
03-30-2006