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Doubtless I inhaled too deeply while stripping paint
from an old door last week (prolonged exposure to fumes
can cause brain damage
). That may explain why
Republican state senators are starting to make sense.
Our legislature is in special session, partly to straighten out Colorado's school finances. Gov. Roy Romer wants to increase taxes for education.
That sounds commendable. However, Sen. Bill Owens, an Aurora Republican, has some interesting facts:
Adjusted for inflation, Colorado spends 30 percent more on education now than it did in 1980. Test scores continue to decline. The United States spends proportionately more on education than Japan and Germany. American students rank low in comparisons. No study has ever shown that putting more money into American schools will result in smarter graduates.
I believe we owe it to our constituents, and to our
children,
Owens wrote, to not merely put additional
dollars into a system which is failing, but to take steps
to change the system.
(Did a teacher ever tell him to
not needlessly split infinitives?)
What changes? Vouchers are a good start; let parents pick their children's schools. That provides a market system to replace monopoly state socialism, which has lately fallen out of favor even in Russia and Sweden.
We could make teachers into true professionals. Let them rent space and hang up their shingles. If a district spends $4,000 a year per student, and the teacher attracts 15 students, then the teacher gets $60,000. He'll have expenses, but even so, both he and the students will fare better than when he had to teach 30 students for $25,000.
Or, if school costs $4,000 a year per child, forget the vouchers, and hand the money, in cash, to the parents each fall. If you have three kids, that's a tax-free $12,000, and that might well pay for one parent to stay home and be the teacher.
We could get the state out of the education business
altogether. In his thoughtful polemic, Deschooling
Society,
Ivan Illich plausibly argues that a state
education system is as unjust, oppressive and corrupt as a
state religion. People have always learned what they needed
to know, whether there were schools or not.
Unfortunately, the Republicans in our state senate may complain, but nobody there proposes any alternatives to the present system, which operates solely to benefit the Colorado Education Association.
That puts the ball back in the governor's court. Boris Yeltsin has the courage to defy tanks, but Roy Romer will not, under any imaginable circumstances, defy the CEA. He'd rather take money from your pocket and give it to a system which will only get worse with more money.
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