Stupid in America, How Lack of Choice Cheats Our Kids Out of a Good Education

It struck me several years ago that for my entire professional career I have endured regular news reports proclaiming the poor quality of the American education system. Invariably, the ills these reports cite seem plausible and possible to me, but are outside my personal experience. Perhaps I am blind, failing to see problems around me. Perhaps I always have taught in those rare, exceptional, schools where the ills of our education system do not exist, but I do not think so. I use to be quite exercised over these reports, but there seemed to be nothing I could do to stop them. Eventually, I included research on school effectiveness in my regular personal studies, tried to do the best work I could with my students, tried to exert as much positive influence as I could in my school and I.S.D., and tried not to take the criticism personally.

Friday night a television program entitled “Stupid in America, How Lack of Choice Cheats Our Kids Out of a Good Education” (link below, and also at: http://www.reason.com/hod/js011306.shtml) was presented by John Stossel on 20/20. It joined the career long chain of negativity I’ve had to endure. Unlike much of the negativity, the program did offer a solution to the multitude of ills facing American schools, voucher schools.

"’It's just like, do you get a Sprint phone or an AT&T phone,’ . . . Why can't kids benefit from similar competition in education?“ My answer to this is they may. However, there does not seem to be enough objective evidence to prove conclusively that they will. Offering even less evidence than exists in current education research, Stossel’s report makes a strong emotional case, gives a few examples, makes many unsupported assertions, but does not prove “lack of choice cheats our kids out of a good education,” rather it claims there is a single simple answer to a complex problem.

The answer to the question, “Why can’t kids benefit from similar competition in education?” is possibly they can. However, because educating just one child is more difficult, complex, and important than choosing a cell phone service provider, such competition is probably not the solution.

Teaching a whole classroom of children is incrementally more complex than educating one child, and educating all of America’s children deserves and requires the kind of thoughtful lifetime commitment that many people, myself included, have made, keeping us at work in public education for decades. That same commitment will keep many of us working to provide the best education we can for as many children as we can for many more years, long after Stossel has moved his intense emotional focus to the next topic, winning the “unusually good ratings” that seem to validate him.