Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Longing for better schools, shorting on all cylinders

The Indianapolis Star's headline "Blacks long for better schools" (August 13, 2006) should have read "Minorities vote against better schools for themselves."

In my numerous runs for political office as a Libertarian Party candidate, including a bid for school board, I have yet to meet or run against a local minority politician who advocated anything but mediocrity in education. This includes one of my first political opponents, Congresswoman Julia Carson. Unfortunately, most local minority children get the mediocre education that their parents predominantly vote for, and have few people but their parents to blame for it. Here's why:

Public education in Indiana is run and supplied by the government, which is a monopoly. This monopoly provides its curriculum and teachers from the same stagnant pool, which has no competition. This pool is fed from the same stale educational source - namely, college education departments - and filtered of brilliance and creativity by blanket teacher accreditation requirements. Government-created monopolies, by their very nature, give mediocre service because there is nothing to compete with them, or nothing to stir up the pool.

Most local minority politicians support mediocre education because they support this government-run monopoly to the exclusion of educational competition. They support this monopoly, not on behalf of the interests of school children, but because the self-interested organizations that benefit from the monopoly, including teacher and public-employee unions, help them get elected.

An alternative to this monopoly is to have the government continue funding public education, but to let private providers supply it. This alternative, called educational or school choice, would break the monopoly of government-run schools by giving parents a choice not to choose their mediocrity. No longer would politicians, with their horrible accountability and lines in the sand, determine who gets the best education.

If, as the Star's article indicates, 67 percent of area blacks want private education for their children, then all they have to do is vote for school choice. But this will require breaking away from most of their political leaders who are on the record opposing this competitive solution and who have historically led their community astray on behalf of the self-interested players within the public education monopoly.

All Hoosier children deserve better education than the mediocre cookie-cutter version that adult voters provide them today. But Hoosier parents and taxpayers, no matter what skin color, have little basis to expect better educational outcomes without voting for competition among education providers and for universal school choice for parents.

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