Hostile Takeover: Resisting Centralized Government's Stranglehold on America

by Matt Kibbe

  It is almost impossible to fire a bad teacher because of how costly and time-consuming unions have made the process. In major cities, only 1 out of 1,000 teachers is fired for performance-related reasons.41 In Chicago, for instance, only 28.5 percent of eleventh graders in Chicago are proficient in reading and math, but only 0.1 percent of teachers were dismissed for bad performance between 2005 and 2008.42 Something doesn’t add up here.

  Some school districts have nearly given up. Over the past three years, New York City has fired only 88 out of about 88,000 school teachers for poor job performance.43 That’s better job security than even incumbent members of Congress enjoy. Instead of attempting the long and costly process of firing a bad teacher, New York City used to put these teachers in so-called “rubber rooms.” At any given time, about 700 New York City schoolteachers were paid not to teach. They sat all day in the rubber rooms and read magazines and chatted. These teachers didn’t do any work and still drew full salaries, at a cost to New York taxpayers of $20 million a year.44

  The rubber rooms were ended after taxpayers got wind of the practice. Now New York City teachers accused of wrongdoings are assigned to do administrative work or “nonclassroom” duties. But the dismissal process for bad teachers has not improved. On average, a failing New York City teacher, when successfully fired, will have spent nineteen months in the disciplinary process.45 It cost an average of $163,142 to fire one teacher in New York City, according to Education Week.46

  The costs and legal hoops associated with firing a teacher prevent school districts from getting rid of the bad apples, even if they are accused of inappropriate behavior with a student. It took six years to fire one New York City teacher who admitted to exchanging sexually explicit e-mails with a sixteen-year-old student. Even though he didn’t teach during those six years, he still got paid more than $350,000.47 It took four years and $283,000 to fire a New Jersey teacher who hit kids.48 The news is filled with disgusting stories of teachers sexually assaulting or physically abusing students. It shouldn’t take several years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to get them out of the classroom and off the taxpayers’ dime.

  Public schools have many great teachers who are model educators. These teachers go the extra mile to inspire and enrich the lives of their students. Great teachers should be rewarded for all their hard work. Private-sector companies generally give bonuses and salary increases to excellent employees. Why should teaching be an exception? Yet it is often just as difficult to reward good teaching as it is to punish poor performance.

  As Friedman wrote in 1962, “With respect to teachers’ salaries, the major problem is not that they are too low on the average—they may well be too high on the average—but that they are too uniform and rigid. Poor teachers are grossly overpaid and good teachers grossly underpaid.”49 Yet union rules often dictate that teacher raises be based on seniority rather than actual performance.

  NO BUREAUCRAT LEFT BEHIND

  JIMMY CARTER CREATED THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION IN 1977 AS a political quid pro quo for the teachers’ unions’ endorsement the previous year.50 Over the last thirty-plus years, unions have continued to pump money into Democratic political gains, and the money has provided a substantial return on their investment. For Democrats, federal interference in education is now an article of faith.

  Education was not considered by the Founders to be a federal responsibility, and it is not specifically listed in the Constitution. It should be left to the states and the people, in accordance with the Tenth Amendment. Eliminating the Department of Education used to be a standard Republican talking point. Ronald Reagan ran on abolishing it in the early ’80s. For years after he left office, it remained GOP orthodoxy. The 1996 GOP platform declared: “The Federal government has no constitutional authority to be involved in school curricula or to control jobs in the market place. This is why we will abolish the Department of Education, end federal meddling in our schools, and promote family choice at all levels of learning.”51

  But after the government shutdown fight of 1995 and 1996, Republicans began to lose stomach for the task and no more was heard of abolishing Jimmy Carter’s Education Department. By 2001, President George W. Bush had partnered with Ted Kennedy to enact a massive expansion of the Department of Education’s funding and reach. The legislation—No Child Left Behind—was passed in a bipartisan fashion.

  The U.S. Department of Education is, at best, a counterproductive waste of money. Like all federal agencies and virtually everything government does, federal education spending costs taxpayers dramatically more than initially predicted. The department’s 2011 budget is nearly six times greater than its first. It has increased from $13.1 billion (in 2007 dollars) in 1980 to $77.8 billion in 2011.52 All that money to prove what we already know: that a group of federal bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., cannot possibly design a curriculum that meets the unique needs of the millions of individual schoolchildren across the nation.

  Just ask the parents. Only 55 percent of parents whose children attend an assigned public school reported being “very satisfied” with their child’s education (and satisfaction is far lower in inner-city public schools), compared to 82 percent of parents whose children attend a private, nonreligious school.53

  We have tried top-down management of education for a generation. We’ve tried top-down union control. The test was taken; the results posted. Government monopoly schools have failed to make the grade. We need to try a bottom-up approach, one that restores control over education to the local level, where parents are put back in charge.

  Parents and students should be free to choose a secular or religious school, a traditional or progressive school, an arts school or one focused on technology. Where there is market demand, options will be supplied. A one-size-fits-all educational approach in public schools meets no one’s particular needs. Every individual child is unique. Each has a different learning style and interests, which the centralized model either fails to recognize or is incapable of responding to.

  Throwing more money at the problem is not the solution. Hiring more teachers hasn’t increased educational outcomes. Schools are not “out of money,” as the education establishment would have us believe. The solution is to break down the centralization of control. The union monopoly has to go. So does the Department of Education. So does No Child Left Behind, with all its mandates and meddling and throwing good money after bad.

  THE CORRECT ANSWER IS FREEDOM

  WHY SHOULDN’T PARENTS BE FREE TO CHOOSE? SCHOOL CHOICE PROGRAMS grant parents more control over their child’s education, empowering them to choose the best educational option for their child. Just as competition and choice has improved everyday products, school choice produces better-performing schools. Two of the most popular proposals are school vouchers and education tax credits.

  It was in fact Milton Friedman, while a professor at the University of Chicago, who first introduced the idea of school vouchers. As he wrote in Capitalism and Freedom, “The parent who would prefer to see money used for better teachers and texts rather than coaches and corridors has no way of expressing this preference except by persuading a majority to change the mixture for all. This is a special case of the general principle that a market permits each to satisfy his own taste—effective proportional representation; whereas the political process imposes conformity.”54

  Since he proposed the revolutionary idea in 1955, school vouchers programs have been implemented in a handful of states, despite what can only be termed unyielding resistance from teachers’ unions and the political establishment. Parents are granted a voucher worth a predetermined amount of money to help them pay for the school of their choice. School vouchers have boosted student achievement, graduation rates, and parental satisfaction. In state after state, freedom is working.

  Milwaukee’s Parental Choice program is a widely popular school voucher program that has been proved to increase math scores and raise high school graduation rates.55 The cost of educating one stud
ent in Milwaukee public schools is $14,011 every year. The Milwaukee Parental Choice program provides up to $6,501 to eligible students, saving taxpayers’ money and increasing parents’ freedom of choice.56

  School vouchers have helped turn tragedy into triumph in New Orleans. Before the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, New Orleans public schools were some of the worst in the nation. The city had only a 40 percent literacy rate, and 50 percent of black students did not graduate from high school in four years.57 In 2008, Louisiana enacted the Student Scholarship for Educational Excellence Program, which gives low-income students a tuition voucher to attend the school of their choice.58 The New Orleans school district now has an open choice policy that allows students to attend any public school regardless of their geographical location.

  The results of Louisiana’s scholarship experiment have been outstanding. On the first day of the voucher program, parents were lining up around the block for a chance to get their child out of failing New Orleans public schools. Sherri Thomas, a parent with two children, who lined up for a chance to receive a voucher, said that “it gives my children, in particular, stability for the first time since Katrina has hit. The school that they are in is not up to standards, academically. And this program, of course, is, and that’s my main reason for being here this morning.”59 The combined district test scores have risen 24 percent since 2005, according to Louisiana Superintendent of Education Paul Pastorek.60

  The District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program was authorized by Congress in 2004. Drafted and championed by House Majority Leader Dick Armey, the legislation allowed students to take some of the dollars that would have been spent on their education at the local school they would have been forced to attend and freed them to choose their own school. The program cost an average of $6,620 per student—one-fourth of the cost that the District pays for K–12 schooling.61 (Constitutional note: While education is one of the areas reserved to the states under Tenth Amendment, the Constitution gives Congress “power to exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever”—that is, to operate like a state or municipal government—within the federal District.62)

  The D.C. scholarship program has also been responsible for increasing student achievement and parental satisfaction.63 The Department of Education found that 91 percent of voucher students graduated, compared to 70 percent of nonvoucher students.64 Parents of students in the voucher program were more likely to describe their child’s new school as “orderly and safe.”65 Students who were in the D.C. Voucher Program when it first started had a nineteen-month advantage in reading compared to their public school counterparts.66

  A young student named Mercedes Campbell was one of the 1,700 D.C. voucher students. The voucher money enabled her to escape the failing D.C. public school system to attend Georgetown Visitation Prep. “It’s different, now that I go to Visitation,” said Mercedes. “I approach things differently. It’s like a whole new world, basically.”67 Unfortunately, the program is a perennial target of entrenched union interests. With the election of Barack Obama, these interests asked for a return on the millions of dollars in campaign cash they had dished out to Obama and the Democrats.

  Despite the substantial and verified benefits to the children of D.C., President Obama and the Democrat-led Congress obliged, ending the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program in 2009. This was nothing short of tragic for the thousands of children who had no choice but to be “educated” in one of the nation’s worst-performing, most expensive, and most violent school systems. After the Tea Party sweep in 2010, the House of Representatives restored the program, but congressional Democrats will surely kill it again, if given the chance. In a brazen display of servitude to the education unions, President Obama again zeroed out the program in his 2013 budget—even while calling for more education spending.

  Elsewhere, states are experimenting with personal education tax credits, which allow taxpayers to subtract educational expenses from the total amount of taxes that they owe, enabling parents to afford a better education for their child. A similar idea: donation education tax credits, which allow individuals or businesses who donate to non-profit scholarship-granting organization to subtract the contribution from the total amount of taxes they owe. These ideas are catching on. Illinois, Minnesota, and Iowa provide personal tax credits to families to offset education costs. Meanwhile, Florida, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Indiana, Georgia, Rhode Island, and Virginia provide tax credits to those who donate to nonprofit scholarship organizations.68

  The Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program has been widely successful and popular. The program provides businesses with a dollar-for-dollar tax credit for donating to Scholarship Funding Organizations. Students receive scholarships equal to $3,950, or the actual tuition and fees charged by the private school, whichever amount is less. More than 23,000 Florida students attend private schools using these generous scholarships. A study by the Friedman Foundation for School Choice found that 80 percent of parents are “very satisfied” with the academic progress their children are making, compared to 4 percent in their previous public schools.69

  Pennsylvania’s Educational Improvement Tax Credit has enabled hundreds of thousands of students to escape failing public schools. Over the past ten years, the program has awarded more than 284,000 scholarships to students, worth $335 million. The Keystone State’s EITC program has saved taxpayers millions of dollars and boosted parental satisfaction.70 It’s a huge win for students, parents, taxpayers, and businesses.

  THE STUDENT LOAN BUBBLE

  BUT IT’S NOT JUST K–12 EDUCATION THAT NEEDS DRASTIC REFORM. America’s higher education system is in crisis as well. Many colleges aren’t preparing their students for their future careers. The price of college is skyrocketing, but educational quality hasn’t improved. More and more college students are trapped with massive student loan debt once they graduate from expensive schools. And in this economy, many can’t find a job that will enable them to pay off the debt.

  The cost of higher education has become outrageous. In the 2011–12 school year, public four-year colleges charged, on average, $8,244 in tuition and fees for in-state students. Out-of-state students spent $12,526 to go to these same schools.71 Taxpayers subsidize a large portion of the tuition costs at public colleges. By comparison, private nonprofit four-year colleges charge, on average, $28,500 per year in tuition and fees.72

  Since 1982, the cost of attending college has risen by 439 percent—more than four times the rate of inflation.73 And the price of attending public colleges has risen faster than that of private colleges. In the 2010–11 school year, the average increase in tuition and fees at public four-year colleges was 8.3 percent for in-state students and 5.7 percent for out-of-state students, compared to an average 4.5 percent increase in the tuition and fees for private nonprofit colleges.74 From 2001 to 2011, the average annual increase in the cost of public four-year institutions was 5.6 percent, compared to 2.6 percent for private schools.75

  Where does all the money go? A lot of it goes to professors, who, like their counterparts in primary and secondary education, are protected by tenure. Colleges are supposed to be about educating students and preparing them for success in their careers, but many professors believe that their research is more important than actually teaching a class. Some even consider teaching to be a burden. A Texas Performance Review found that the average professor at a research university teaches only 1.9 courses per semester. About 22 percent of faculty members do not teach a single class.76

  Tenure at the college level has been destructive to higher education. Tenured professors are guaranteed their jobs for life and generally only teach a few hours a week, if they teach at all. Most tenured professors make well over $100,000 a year, often producing research that has little to no direct value to students.77

  Most colleges are also suffering from administrative bloat. The number of administrative employees at leading colleges is rapidly growing. Between 1993 and 2007, the number
of administrators per 100 students at leading universities grew by 39 percent, while the number of employees dedicated to teaching and research grew by only 18 percent.78

  Despite the ever-rising cost, college represents a low return on investment. The class of 2010 has faced the highest unemployment rate in recent years, at 9.1 percent.79 A survey found that 56 percent of 2010 graduates have not found a job within a year.80 Another study, conducted by Rutgers University, found that the median salary for students graduating in 2009 and 2010 was $27,000—down from $30,000 in 2006 and 2008.81 Many students who graduated with degrees in biology or English find themselves bartending or waiting tables.

  At the college level, too, the problems can be traced back to a centralized approach to education policy. The federal government’s financial aid programs are largely responsible for higher tuition costs. These loans and grants increase demand for college, which translates to higher tuition costs for all. Ironically, some are unable to afford college because government has artificially increased the price by trying to make it possible for more people to attend college.

  And you wonder why the Millennial Generation is pissed off and pessimistic about the future?

  One of the most common government financial aid programs is Pell Grants. These taxpayer-funded grants are given to low-income students and do not need to be paid back. Approximately 8.3 million college students received an average of $3,865 in Pell Grants during the 2010–11 school year.82 Hillsdale College professor Gary Wolfram found that “private four-year colleges increased listed tuition prices by more than two dollars for each dollar increase in Pell Grants, and public four-year colleges increased their listed tuition by 97 cents for every dollar increase.”83

  Only a small handful of colleges in the United States have taken the principled position of not accepting any form of federal funding. The earliest and still the most outspoken of these are Hillsdale College in Michigan and my alma mater, Grove City College in Pennsylvania. Since the enactment of Senator Ted Kennedy’s Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1988, both Hillsdale and Grove City have said, “No, thanks” to any federal student aid—forced by the government to refuse students who accept federal government loans or grants.