Passage of the Day: John Stossel on His Education Establishment Antagonists
My, my what a “classless” (so to speak) bunch of critics Stossel has.
But Stossel is ready for them:
The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) objects that I “conveniently” failed to note that an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) study found that “the six countries that spend the most on education as a percentage of GDP … all score well above the international mean on the PISA.” OK, some countries spend a lot of money and do well. But that very same OECD study said that no fewer than 20 countries that spend less money than we do achieve better scores, and that “Spending alone is not sufficient to achieve high levels of outcomes.” The United States spends $83,910 per student from ages 6 to 15. The Slovak Republic, which outperforms the United States in this study, spends $17,612 per student.
The NEA also claimed I’m not objective because I make speeches for money. I do, but I donate the money to charities. For example, I give money to Student Sponsor Partners, an organization that pays for poor kids to go to private school. You might say I put my money where my mouth is — unlike the teachers’ organizations, which often put their mouths where the money is.
Perhaps the most fundamentally flawed idea is this all-too-common one: “Public schools were created to provide a ‘public good’: education for all, regardless of a family’s ability to pay … By contrast, under a voucher system that gives public dollars to completely unmonitored private schools, there is no such right to expect or demand accountability for student performance or how tax dollars are spent.” They don’t get it. Competition brings accountability. Private schools may be “unmonitored” by bureaucrats, but they face the most demanding kind of supervision our society provides: a market full of freely choosing individuals. Parents’ desire for a good education for their children is a much more powerful check on schools than any politician’s law or union rule. The people who want to control every young American’s education like to talk about accountability, but what they want is to make schools accountable to anointed bureaucrats who think they know what’s best for all of us. They evade real accountability — the kind of accountability where if a student or parent realizes a school isn’t doing its job, he can find another one.
The first argument, on GDP, is a really dumb one for the AFT to trot out. The US has the highest per-capita GDP in the world. If a dirt-poor country has to spend, say 30% of GDP on education, does that mean we must? That’s preposterous — which is also a good description for a system on which we spend so much and get so little.
