Health care is rightly dominating the national debate, but with children all across the country heading back to school, education, currently seated in the back row of the national classroom, is raising its hand and asking to be called on.
On Tuesday, President Obama will be giving a nationally televised speech on education to America's students, broadcast on C-SPAN and the White House website. On the same day, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Viacom are sponsoring a major conference in Los Angeles that will serve as the kick off of Get Schooled, a far-reaching initiative geared to developing solutions to the problems facing America's education system. (I'll be one of the speakers.)
Remember when the Washington establishment passed No Child Left Behind, shook hands, patted each other on the back, and checked education reform off its To Do list? Well, George Bush's version of education reform (aided and abetted by Congressional Democrats) turned out to be reform in name only.
This bipartisan breakdown is, of course, nothing new. Through the years, we've had presidents from both parties promising to improve our schools -- and failing to do so.
In the process, we've grown accustomed to the system's chronic failure -- particularly when it comes to minority students, where we are facing nothing less than an educational catastrophe, with shockingly high numbers of poor and minority students unable to read at grade level by the fourth grade.
In the face of this educational apartheid, we should have no illusions about what is at stake. As writer Mikel Holt puts it: "The old civil rights movement got us to the lunch counter. The new civil rights agenda is: can our kids read the menu?"
It's time to acknowledge that over 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education we are witnessing a de facto resegregation of our schools, with blacks and Hispanics more separate from white students than at any time since the civil rights movement.
In contrast, the last 30 years have been a boom time for America's jails, with new prisons popping up at a rate even McDonald's would envy, while the number of people living behind bars has quadrupled: "Over 2 million dissatisfied customers served."
Particularly troubling is the fact that close to 150,000 children are in custody and that high school dropout rates are in lockstep with the rate of juvenile incarceration. As a result, many of America's schools have become preparatory facilities not for college but for jail.
Time after time, when the choice has come down to books versus bars, our political leaders have chosen to build bigger prisons rather than figuring out how to have fewer kids in them.
How is it that we are willing to spend so much on kids once they are found guilty of crimes but so little when they are still innocent? What kind of society spends more than 10 times as much to incarcerate a child as it does to educate him?
It's time we start looking at education reform in bold and different ways, to stop protecting little parcels of partisan turf and start thinking outside the box. To consider the possibilities. To look past our own political backyards at what might lie on the other side of the mountain.
What I see on the other side of the mountain is a single-payer education system.
In a single-payer health care plan, the federal government provides coverage for all U.S. citizens and legal residents. Patients don't go to a government doctor -- they just have the government pay the bill.
And that's how it would work with education. In a single-payer education plan, the federal government, in conjunction with the states, would provide an education allotment for every parent of a K-12 child. Parents would then be free to enroll their child in the school of their choice.
In a single-payer health care plan, all citizens would be free to select the physician and hospital of their choice. And, unlike in our education system, no one backing single-payer health care ever suggested that patients can only see a doctor in their own district or can only be operated on at the hospital down the street. If we don't hold people's health hostage to the health of their property values, why do we do this with their children's education?
The single-payer health plan would be financed by a payroll tax. In education, the annual cost per child -- equalized for urban and suburban school districts across each state -- would come from the current education funding sources.
When it comes to quality control, in health care the guidelines incorporated by Medicare would be used to manage the quality of health-care services. In education, the government would be responsible for accrediting the schools among which parents could choose.
It's simple, sensible and, above all, just. And maybe instead of calling for an exorcist any time the words "competition," "choice" or "freedom" are used in connection to education, we can start singing hosannas for an idea that preserves what is truly public in public education -- the government, i.e. the public, paying for it -- while allowing creativity, innovation and parental empowerment to flourish.
What Abraham Lincoln said in his second annual address to Congress in 1862 applies powerfully to today's education crisis: "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.... As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew."
And when it comes to saving out children, there is not a moment to waste.
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I would love to include my child in a public education system, but feel the entrenched autocratic nature of modern institutional schooling is directly at odds with raising a happy, free-thinking, independent, compassionate citizen of a participatory democracy. It seems only a relatively small percentage of kids manage to emerge from our current system with their curiosity, critical thinking, and love of learning intact, and even fewer have had an opportunity to discover and develop the true talents that they're passionate about.
So our family has chosen to walk away from the tax dollars we pay into the education system. But we would jump at the chance to utilize those funds to enroll our child in progressive, democratically run educational enrichment!
Here's an excellent series of articles that makes the case for TRULY progressive education...
Freedom to Learn: The roles of play and curiosity as foundations for learning
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn
Your comments on prisons are also worth noting but education isn't the only thinmg that needs to be done to reduce prison population. The most important thing that needs to be done is to reducae child abuse. The reason this is so important is because most inmates started off by going through a rough childhood before they became violent. I wrote more about this in my new Blog if anyone is interested. http://zakherys.tripod.com/nonviolence
Sorry for the pun.
But I mean it: Yes, we CAN have single payer health care.
The privateized health care has proven without fail, without doubt, and without exception:
1. it is more expensive than any government run health care system on the planet
2. it produces less jobs
3. it keeps more people sick
4. it produces mor corruption than pills
and most importantly
4. it PROFITS FROM DEATH of even paying customers if there is profit in letting them die
Now, the first four points would mean that economically the system is a failure on every level they promised us would IMprove when they told us about how great privatization is.
The last point actually makes it a crime.
There is no discussion about it. Ig I do something with intent to help and it kills someone - I GOT TO JAIL! - And rightfully so. The do it with thousands of people they let suffer and die for their profit.
If we can not have a single player health care system we support criminals. So at some point we have to ralize that not only can we have one. - We must if we are not to be party to crimes leading to uncountable deaths.
Those who have this kind of insurance ( a surcharge to their property taxes ?) can go to the doctors who can opt to become "public" in part or in the whole. The doctors and clinics who prefer not to be public physicians, can simply continue to run their clinics privately and can be paid by those patients who take their healthcare to private physicians and can buy private insurance to pay for these. Just like the current educational system. Parents who homeschool (faith healers?) and those who send their children to parochial schools with private tuition fees continue to pay property taxes as well.
If we had a local healthcare system, just like education, many will love it, many will hate it, but we will live with it. Won't we ?
Parents have be told they an their children will no longer run the schools and if they do not like take them out. The schools must have final word and be allowed to have the respect teachers and pricipal once had.
Rules that are really enforced instead of parnets interfering when their children are causing havoic in a classroom.
Both parties for the last 2 decades have destroyed the education system with the help of the unions . Great teachers have run from the education system in droves because of bad saleries and the destruction of leadership in the schools.
We need to pay more for good teachers and rid ourselves of the union rules that allow bad teachers to have any advantage because they have been teaching longer then others. This is a joke aganist us and our education system so please tell those that want a change to wake up and smell the roses and kck themselvs in the ass for reall HONEST EFFECTIVE CHANGES
Why can't we extend this principle to education? Let's institute vouchers so that alternative educational institutions can compete with the government's!
And that applies to Social Security as well: let's have private accounts that people can have the option to place their contributions into!
You can thank Milton Friedman for pushing for this for most of his career.