The Public Education Dilemma

Mark Greathouse

(2/2021) William Butler Yeats, Nobel Prize winning Irish poet, wrote, "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." He’s turning over in his grave today. 

Today’s K-12 public education system offers a dilemma. It’s a shapeless blob of competing interests representing federal, state, and local education departments, teacher unions, academia, curricula publishers, education bureaucrats, and politicians. It perpetuates an archaic one-size-fits-all public education system (a.k.a., the Prussian model). It has duped millions of parents into believing that it is infallible. It subjugates individualism to a government system under the guise of some fallacious "greater good." 

Insanity can be defined as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result. Thus, the U.S. public education system is total insanity. While there are some great dedicated teachers and loving concerned parents, the system has let them down…big time.

A high school graduate teen signs her name on a credit receipt with an "X." She never learned cursive. A high school senior with three years of shop classes cannot read a tape measure on a summer construction job. A recent college graduate vehemently promotes socialist government but was never educated as to its consistent failures. Young adults don’t know whom their elected representatives are…and don’t care. I have personally encountered these young folks.

It’s essential that our citizens be prepared for life by being well-educated. Instead, politics have muddied the education waters. It’s become a battle of competing ideologies bent on control of the masses. Sixth century Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu advised that governments control people by keeping their minds empty and bellies full. We’re nailing the empty minds part. Our public education system has insidiously become a leftist indoctrination machine touting anti-exceptional, anti-individual, and anti-free speech agendas. It’s so subtle, most folks are clueless to it.

What makes my opinions credible? I spent 3 years on a local school board in Pennsylvania, experiencing first-hand the depth of corruption, the inadequacy, the genuflecting to liberal agendas, and the utter lies about education quality. I spent 8 years as an adjunct college professor, dealing first-hand with inadequately-prepared public school graduates. I do hold an advanced college degree in business. And, I was blessed to have spent 13 years home schooling my two sons. I avoided most pitfalls of the K-12 system and now enjoy them excelling in their post college lives.

Broken trust is part of the education dilemma. Most parents blindly trust that public schools will deliver meaningful education, but the education blob leverages that trust to perpetuate its own agendas while wasting billions of dollars on faddish scams like open classrooms and Common Core Standards that mortgage our nation’s future with flawed curricula and excessive time-wasting testing. Notably, the students who do well despite the education blob usually have caring parents actively involved in their education.

Even recent teacher grads and today’s parents have been fed a steady diet of progressive brainwashing. Parents should be outraged, but they mostly stand benignly by as the education blob destroys their children’s futures and the future of our nation. For example, parents and board members were totally AWOL when it came time to actually review Common-Core-based curricula? I’ve experienced that lack of involvement first hand, and we see the result in ever-more progressive, history-bending, socialism-based curricula indoctrinating precious generations of our children. Equally bad is this failed education system hamstringing good teachers, as they spend inordinate time on standardized testing while scrambling to inculcate at least some skeletal level of knowledge with the remaining time. Moreover, under-performing teachers are protected by tenure and receive salary increases regardless of shoddy performance. (How many private sector employees would love that?) The system is fraudulent.

The schools in the district for which I served on the board were lauded by parents despite it wallowing academically in the bottom third of the 500 districts in its state. During my service, the administration reluctantly responded to board demands for monthly academic progress and financial status reports. The high school report touted athletic, chorus, and dance programs. Math? English? Science? Nada! This is what parents had been duped into thinking is such a great system as to warrant residing within the bounds of the district.

Local schools need local solutions. Pliant school boards beholden to leftist-leaning teachers and unions need a wake-up call. Throwing money at school problems without destroying the blob and achieving commensurate improvement is a fool’s game. Academics must be improved and budget austerity sustained in an environment of declining enrollments and ever-lowering tax bases. Bullying must be stopped, and the perpetrators punished instead of the victims. School debt must be eliminated. Ratcheting back testing is critically important. It’s imperative to set ambitious agendas for improved academic performance, especially STEM and reading programs. Labor trades training must be delivered. We must feature high priority for instructional time, offer bonuses for outstanding teachers, and get parents actively involved at ALL grade levels. Excellence should be rewarded.

At higher government levels, states need to stop cow-towing to fad-based curricula and associated mind-numbing, resource-wasting tests, as well as overhaul budget-killing public-school employee retirement systems so as to control exponentially rising costs. It’s bad enough that both school budgets and taxes will inevitably increase but not to the direct benefit of students. Budgets must continue to be optimized to meet these concerns without raising taxes that especially impact low/fixed-income citizens and drive them from our communities. Oh, and the federal government needs to totally steer clear of education; it’s well above its pay grade. Government and politicians are a huge part of the problem. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the teacher unions (National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers) combine at the top of the 25 largest political contributors with nearly $80 million between 1989 and 2014. Talk about influence peddling! What politician on the union take will lift a finger to fight against such might?

The monster hydra we call higher education lurks. Space won’t permit adequate discussion here of America’s high education morass, so it will be dealt with in my part 2 op-ed.

Our public-school systems are broken but not beyond repair. Grown-ups must set positive, constructive, adult examples for students. Students should truly get to be first. Boards, parents, administrators, and teachers must team to turn back the government public education blob and their insidious legacy of failure. School choice is an absolute must. Our children must be prepared for taking on the real world. It’s paramount that schools deliver that preparation through optimally educating our children to actually learn, to light the fire Yeats spoke of. As the education blob continues on its relentlessly destructive path, great alternatives for fighting back include charter schools, home schooling, and private schools. Our nation’s future is at stake. Just sayin’.

To be continued next month

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