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Liz Michael for United States Senate

The Conspiracy of Ignorance: The Failure of American Public Schools
by Martin L. Gross


Martin L. Gross takes aim at a lumbering, elephant-sized target: public education. Armed with statistics and research papers--the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) being his most prominent sources--Gross rails against the declining performance of U.S. students. While his criticisms--which encompass everything from teachers' unions to "useless" education degrees, PTAs, psychological services in schools, even honor roll bumper stickers--are not new, they make an imposing indictment when presented all together.

Gross poses a number of radical solutions, including the elimination of undergraduate schools of education (replaced by a one-year postgraduate course that prepares scholars to become teachers in their specialty). He believes the entire education system should--and can--be overhauled without spending any more than at present. One of his suggestions to make funds available for reform is to cut support personnel, but he doesn't address how schools would then clean themselves without custodians or how high school crime would be affected by the loss of security guards and police officers. While Gross's tendency to use his own high school experience as a model of excellence grows tiresome, his points are well taken. The Conspiracy of Ignorance will have you either nodding in agreement or aching to wring the author's neck

Isaac Harby of Charleston 1788-1828 : Jewish Reformer and Intellectual (Judaic Studies)
by Gary Phillip Zola, Jacob R. Marcus
A man of many talents, Harby participated actively in the intellectual life of Charleston, South Carolina and was known as one of the region's most respected literati.  Harby also played a leading role in the establishment of the Reformed Society of Israelites--the first formal attempt to reform Judaism in the United States.  Harby's life provides an excellent study for examining both the rise and fall of Charleston as an intellectual and cultural center and for investigating the first efforts to reform traditional Judaism and adapt it to a modern American environment. Dr. Zola rediscovers the intellectual and social world of early Southern Jewry.

"People need to know they can walk away from bad schools. Choice changes the psychology of it." -Bill Clinton

Education

Our attempts at solving the education crisis are completely backward. The problem is not one of money, but of methodology. Government is not the solution to the education crisis: government is the problem with, and the cause of, the education crisis.

How can governments increase student achievement, lower dropout rates, reduce violence and improve teacher performance? Get out of the way, that's how! The problems in our schools have their root in special interest domination, union bosses, bloated bureaucracies and corrupt school officials.

There is no other way to cure our educational ills than to allow and encourage competition with public schools. Our responsibility as a society is not to preserve public schools at all costs, but to educate our children, regardless of how this is accomplished. We cannot as a society continue to fund failure.

A Radical Restructuring

Parents and children should be given full control and authority to choose the school which the child shall attend, and also given full control of the educational dollar. Full control, not control of a bureaucratically emaciated dollar. And I would legislate complete parental choice of where and how their child should be educated.

Complete Parental Choice

Under a Complete Choice educational system, questions like prayer in school, sex education, racial quotas and the ethnic makeup of schools, and the education of immigrants would become matters of choice: what could not be offered in a public school would be offered in a private school or in home schooling, and the parents' dollars which would have gone to public schools should by right be allowed to be spent in private facilities. After all, IT IS THE PARENTS' MONEY, not the schools'. The dumbing down of American students and the attempt to endoctrinate them instead of teaching them how to learn, would cease if a policy of Complete Choice were followed nationwide.

Return control of schools to the parents and the community

As opposed to a system where education is dependent upon various state and federal monies and mandates, education should be returned to the community, where only the parents, students, and teachers have control over the process. School boards should be elected by a vote of the parents and not anyone else's vote. It takes a family to raise a child, and yes "it takes a village", but it does not take a government bureaucrat or union hack.

EDUCATION TAX EXEMPTIONS AND CREDITS

Parents should recieve full state tax credits and exemptions for any expenses used to educate their children for pre-school, K through 12, and the first four years of college. If we as a society really believe in education as a priority, we ought to enable and encourage parents to fully exercise this responsibility.

Student Achievement Grants

I support the concept of a Student Achievement Grant, which would pay public funds to educators, education facilities and home schools for superior academic achievement. Such grants would be paid regardless of the place where the learning occurs, be it public, private, parochial, corporate or home schools.

The public system would set the academic criteria for each grade level and create a student test to demonstrate achievement. Any student can take any grade level test at any time. If they pass, they get the full amount of the per-student state funding.

But it only pays for results, not promises. It requires the public system to disclose its criteria for grade advancement, eliminating social promotion and allowing comparison between all forms of educational services, home schooling and self-teaching included. The public criteria will apply to all test-takers, so payment would be made to private students based on the completion of the official government criteria. It would enhance the ability of students to "jump" grade levels and get paid for their achievement.     

Abolish large school districts

I support the states outright legislating that a School District managing unit be MANDATED to be below a certain size of student population. If small class sizes are ideal, and I believe they are, then certainly small school districts are as well.

Using the Los Angeles Unified School District as an example, local cities and communities such as those covered by the L. A. Unified should be broken off into school districts encompassing their own communities, with their own elections. And the City of Los Angeles rightly needs no fewer than 6 separate school districts, 2 for the San Fernando Valley, 2 for the central area of Los Angeles, one for the Westside and one for the Harbor. Additionally, unincorporated East Los Angeles is large enough to merit its own district. I would leave to the cities how they should break up L. A. Unified: but I would mandate at the state level that they break it up. I see no defense for permitting L. A. Unified to be allowed to continue to exist.

Ban "Social Promotion"

So-called "Social Promotion" of failing students must be banned at the state level. Social promotion is fraud: a fraudlent device used by school bureaucrats to con us into thinking they have done their duty.

Restore the Original Intent of Head Start

Today, Head Start has devolved into a nutritional and glorified babysitting program. Its original intent was to be a literacy and mathematics enhancement program designed to successfully lead pre-schoolers into grade school. It should be returned to its original intent. Given that these programs, although funded by the federal government, are operated at the local level, a state can and should mandate that its Head Start programs be mandated to provide substantial literacy and math education to our pre-school children.

The Ideal of Education and the Global Responsibilty

I forsee a fabric of public, parochial, and sundry private school systems, as well as home schools, with all benefiting from the competition between them. For too long, bureaucrats, politicians and unions have connived this "them vs. us" scenario between public and private schools. This is wrong.

The responsibility of educating our children is a universal responsibility. It is not just a responsibility to support public school children, and defintiely not a duty to protect public institutions. It is a responsibility to see that ALL OUR CHILDREN, regardless of whether they attend a public or non-public institution, are educated. This is not "Them vs. Us", or "Public vs. Private". WE ARE ALL "US" in this situation. And we have a responsibility which transcends what we now know as "government".

But can a publicly supported Public-Private mix work in the inner city?

Having seen private, low cost schools work in the inner city, my answer is an unqualified yes. A good neighborhood school is not that expensive to run, and is fully controlled by the parents and teachers locally instead of being dominated by bureaucrats in an ivory tower afar off. Moreover, superior, committed schools will find themselves very able to get corporate sponsorship. Moreover, given the increase in technology advances, having some corporate run schools in the mix which specialize in these technologies, particularly at the high school level, makes all the sense in the world.

Some of the best private schools there are, the schools of the Archdiocese, are also some of the least expensive to attend. Almost all private schools take a certain number of legitimate charity and poverty students on scholarships: guaranteeing the poor an education under Complete Choice will be very doable, much more doable than guaranteeing adequate public schools have proven to be.

College Education

Through allowing parents to keep more of their earned income through significant tax reductions, we can insure there will be more dollars available for parents to send their children to college.

Moreover, much of the high cost of today's education is a direct result of the government subsidy. A college cannot charge its students more than the market will bear, so for all the concern about young people being shut out of college, according to the market that just cannot happen. Scholarships currently available for poor students to get an education will still be there, in greater number than under current policy, with lower taxes, and especially if we directly encourage such giving with tax credits. Good schools will always seek out the best and brightest from the economically disadvantaged class.

The student loan guarantee program seemed like a good idea at the time of initiation. Yet the result has been the federal government picking up the tab for a whole lot of unpaid loans. The number of outright deadbeats are actually extremely few. What really has happened is that defaults of these loans have come by and large through failure of these students to make sufficient income in their first years of employment to meet both their personal expenses and these loans. This indicates that these programs need substantial reevaluation, if it cannot even produce sufficient income for the students under it to pay the bills.

I do believe that student aid is another concept which needs to be returned to the states and taken away from the federal government. My personal opinion is that loans are a fiscally unsound way to finance education: outright grants and scholarships, and work programs through the school of attendance, are more financially viable options.

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