It’s Time to GUT Government Schools and Give Parents Choice
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School lies. I’ve often gone off on the teachers unions and also democratic politicians who love getting money from the teachers unions. Our school system in this country is a disaster by every metric. I’m going to use some sports stuff here. Bill Parcells once said, you are what your record says you are.
And you can go around over the past couple of weeks, we’ve talked over about some of the numbers in regards to the money spent, how it’s being used per capita spending, the amount of administrators, and then you also take a look at the results, which quite frankly are just terrible. Just terrible. And we have this belief system here in this country. believe, spend more money. So all we need to do is to send more money to schools.
then it’s going to be the answer for everything. And that’s what we continue to do. And it doesn’t work. Again, making our country with a bunch of bunch of idiots, quite frankly, doing the same thing over and over again, expecting some sort of different result. It’s patently absurd. I’m one that happens to believe that competition breeds excellence. It does. Iron sharpens iron, whatever you want to say. And
One thing that we don’t have here in this country when it comes to schools outside, of course, you the private schools, is competition.
Competition, again, it’s the government. Government runs the damn thing. And again, we see the results. We see the per capita spending. We see the test scores and what a disaster they are. It is fascinating because, again, you have different areas of big country and how things operate here. I’ve often talked about the public school district that my kids
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went to. And it’s a top school. You take a look at the results, you take a look at where the kids go to school, how well they do. But I’m also well aware of the fact that it’s not because we have the greatest teachers in the world. I understand that. Guess what? Parents care.
Parents care. Parents go, I mean, the real estate in our neighborhood, and this is true in many places around the country, is very, very valuable where you have good school districts. It’s actually, there was that story, and I had to make a movie out of it, out of Jericho, Long Island there. I was with Hugh Jackman. The name of the movie will come to me in a second. And it was at the beginning of the movie, they had real estate agents coming in and bringing
in all these gift baskets and whatnot to members of the school board and the principals there based upon how well the school is because the value of the real estate in around the area is going to the roof. And that’s a big part of it. That’s a big part of it. Parents care. I need to be in this school district. And are they wrong? I’m here to tell you for a fact that they’re not wrong. OK, I know how colleges and universities
operate. I’ve got insiders that are on the boards of these schools. When they go to certain areas of the country, especially high level schools or highly ranked schools, they know, they know what schools, okay, we’re going to take X amount of kids from this state or this community. These are the schools that we go to. I remember first encountering this, this was, I remember the year 2003.
2004, I was living in the state of Florida and the public school that was nearest I had again, I had a starting the lacrosse program down there and we had kids starting it. Okay, brand new kids from various different schools. It was a club. And one of the kids on the team was going on to college to play lacrosse but he was an accomplished kid who’s valedictorian of his high school. He had all sorts of extracurricular activities, applied to a myriad of
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Ivy League schools, he got rejected by them all. He went to Georgetown, obviously great school. And I did some investigating, families that I knew, people that were involved on the actual boards of various different colleges, and they explained to me how it works. They said, we’re only taking X amount of people from this area of the country and we only go to these schools.
It is what it is, people, okay? That’s the system. That’s the system. And again, there’s other factors in as well. We have to check certain boxes based upon who you are and all that. We get all of that. But why in the world, again, the only reason why the left, they want to crush any sort of school competition is because of their, again,
the money that they are getting from unions and the fact that these unions continue to vote Democrat. It is what is. Why would you really try to improve a district? Or again, like I was saying here, certain communities where you have these school districts, they almost act as if they’re a gated community. It becomes very, very difficult.
to break in, you can’t get in, you can’t live there, whatever it may be. And again, if you are a parent, okay, and you care about your kid’s education, because again, that’s the underlying theme right there, okay? Parents don’t care, kids don’t care, just that simple. You’re one of these parents there that might be new to the country, might be an immigrant, whatever it may be, and you’re in a school district that sucks. Sucks, parents don’t care.
You’re in classrooms where the kids are disruptive. Nothing is done about it. It’s one of those assembly line type schools. Let’s get the kids through in and out as fast as we possibly can and just move on. Okay. Let’s check all those boxes and get on. But you want your kid to actually get an education.
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You want your kid out of that school, you care. Why shouldn’t the dollars that are spent on your kid, let’s say for example, what do they spend over $20 ,000 per student, New York City, Baltimore, Washington, DC. You have to take a look at some of the, there’s actually been some great, great reporting done in the city of Baltimore. It should be a national story to tragedy how bad the schools are.
They’re spending over $20 ,000 per kid. Shouldn’t that money say, hey, I want to send my kid to a private school?
Or I want to send them to a public school that works, allow that money to follow that kid to a private school that’s doing better, forcing these public schools to compete against one another. And listen, people, I’m not stupid. Okay, I understand that certain schools are, quite frankly, they’re mission impossible.
Their mission impossible, like I said, you got parents that are not on top of the kids, what are you going to do? But again, shouldn’t we be trying, trying to save the kids and help the kids that we can? it’s not fair, it’s gotta be, no, life’s not fair.
Life’s not fair. And I’ve talked about this before. Again, you want privilege here? you’re privileged. It’s parental privilege, quite frankly. That’s what it is. And that’s not gonna change.
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You can take a look at the statistics for crying out loud. mean, they lay it right out there. Kids that grow up in two -parent households, parents that give it their best, they’re going to succeed more often than not.
We all know what the alternative is.
But again, no, no, no, no, no, we can’t do that. It doesn’t sell politically. This story today, Jason Riley in the Wall Street Journal, how presidents, you know, posing vouchers and other forms of school joys. Again, for a while we were getting some, you know, some charter schools, some Democrats trying to embrace it to some degree as an alternative to some of the underperforming traditional public schools.
Joe Biden’s budget proposal would cut funding for the charter schools program, which has provided grants nearly half of the nation’s charter schools. This was started under Bill Clinton, Barack Obama expanded it. Charter schools receive public funds, but are given more flexibility in hiring, managing teachers and adapting curricula to the specific needs of the student population. If Democrats in the binary have soured on charters, it isn’t because they’re following a lead of constituencies. The party claims champion.
Charters have long enjoyed strong support from low income, racial and ethnic minorities, particularly those with school -aged children. An opinion poll released in May by Democrats for Education Forum found that 77 % of parents, including 80 % of blacks, 71 % of Hispanics had a favorable view of charters. Nor can Democrats plausibly say that charter schools don’t work, given all of the research over the decades that show otherwise.
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Researchers at Stanford assessed that performance of students at 6 ,200 charter schools in 29 states between 2014 and 2019 found that charter school students on average outperformed their peers in traditional public schools. Academic growth among low income minority charter students was the strongest. And I can go on and on and on. And Jason Riley did the piece today, opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal.
care about the kids doing any better. It’s not what it’s about. It’s always about political expediency. More and more using kids to serve their own needs. More and more school lies. Watchdog on wallstreet .com.