Compare these two stories.

Hundreds line up for school choice

Hundreds of parents lined up early this morning to sign up for the Brandywine School District’s school choice program, taking their place behind about 35 parents who had camped out overnight for a spot at the front of the line.

The sign-up was supposed to begin at 8 a.m., but the doors opened at 6:45 to accommodate the crowd.
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Parents had been lining up since about 2 p.m. Sunday for the opportunity to sign up for the district’s limited number of spaces.

A Crucial Decision For the Obamas: Public or Private?

Like many parents moving their children to Washington, Barack and Michelle Obama will be told to avoid D.C. public schools. Is that good advice?

This is a tricky subject. School choice is very personal. The president-elect’s fifth-grade daughter, Malia, and second-grade daughter, Sasha, have been attending the first-rate, private University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. I bet they transfer to Georgetown Day School, a good fit because of its similarity to their current school, its historic role as the city’s first racially integrated school and the presence of Obama senior legal adviser Eric H. Holder Jr. on its board of trustees. It would be a sensible decision by two smart, caring people.
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But it wouldn’t hurt to look around first. Georgetown Day, like other private schools, would charge them nearly $56,000 a year for two kids. Why not see what their tax dollars are paying for? One educational gem happens to be the closest public school to their new home. Strong John Thomson Elementary School is at 1200 L St. NW, three-fifths of a mile from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Go north on 15th, turn right on L and three blocks farther it’s on the right.

School choice may be personal for the Obama’s, but thanks to the policies of President-elect Obama and his friends at the NEA, many are denied that choice. Unable to afford to both pay taxes for public schooling and enroll their children in private schools, many are trapped in a failing government school system.  Or they have to line up all night to fight over a few school choice bread crumbs.  But why should Obama care? The two girls lucky enough to share his last name will do just fine.

A Washington Post article features a story on how NCLB deals with a school of special needs children:

Stephen Knolls School suffered the ignominy of failure under federal law in 2006 and 2007 for low test scores. This year, the Kensington school finally made the grade in reading and math — only to be sanctioned for poor attendance.

The challenge in this case is not truancy. Stephen Knolls serves medically fragile children with severe physical and cognitive disabilities, such as cerebral palsy, spina bifida and Rett syndrome.

…

“We know that there are legitimate reasons for [students] to be home,” said Tina Shrewsbury, school coordinator. “They’re going to [medical] specialists. . . . They’re having lab tests done. They’re being hospitalized.”

The dispute offers “a classic case of how well-intentioned federal policy has gone awry,” said Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at the University of California at Berkeley. “This district is earnestly trying to follow the spirit of the No Child law.” But that doesn’t give Stephen Knolls any help with a rating system controlled by the state and federal governments.

Conservatives routinely rail against the folly of relying only on good intentions in government policy.  There is no doubt that NCLB identified a flaw in the current educational system, a lack of accountability, and was a good faith effort to address that flaw.  The problem is that, in doing so, President Bush abandoned any pretense of conservative understanding of the limits of government solutions, not to mention any belief in state’s rights.  Thus it is easily understood why he was joined by Ted Kennedy in championing the bill.

NCLB and Stephen Knolls School exemplify the problem with government solutions: they are inflexible, one-size-fits-all programs largely incapable of adapting to local circumstances.  Our education system is in dire need of accountability if it is ever going to perform up to the standards we desire, but that accountability cannot by supplied by government.   The Republican party used to understand this when it elected Reagan on a platform that included the desired abolition of the Department of Education.

The only way to bring real accountability to our education system is to return power to the people who have the most at stake: parents and students.  End the government monopoly on education and the goals of NCLB would be moot.  Give people choice and see how quickly things improve.  That is the solution conservatives should support.

There can be no greater stretch of arbitrary power than is required to seize children from their parents, teach them whatever the authorities decree they shall be taught, and expropriate from the parents the funds to pay for the procedure…A tax supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.

- Isabel Paterson

On a similar matter to the video I posted yesterday, it seems Britain is seriously considering taking a hint from the Swedish and might actually allow their citizens a bit of educational freedom.

This summer, at least 25,000 children will drop out of English schools without a single qualification to show for their years of compulsory education. Some 240,000 will graduate from primary school unable to read or write properly. By autumn, some 250 schools judged to be failing will welcome an intake of new pupils. Youth unemployment will probably hit an 11-year high. It will, tragically, be just another year in one of the world’s highest-funded education systems.

Two strategies are available to David Cameron in addressing this scandal, should he get to No. 10. He could perform his own surgery on the comprehensive system pretending, as all prime ministers pretend, that he can actually control it. The Local Education Authorities, with whom the power rests, would almost certainly ignore him, as they did Tony Blair. But the second policy would be a new one. He would invite anyone to set up a new state school, run it independently of government, and receive a sum likely to be more than £6,000 a pupil.

He would, in short, seek to bring the Swedish education revolution to Britain. When Mr Cameron first promised to do this at the Tory conference in Blackpool (along with Wisconsin-style welfare reform), it sounded a rather abstract idea, the stuff of think-tank seminars rather than everyday life. Yet in the last five months Michael Gove, the shadow schools secretary, has been carefully designing a blueprint which would enable the establishment of a new breed of local independent schools, funded by the state but not run by it. It is potentially a plan of huge significance.

…

Freedom works.  Maybe one day the unions and other entrenched interests can be defeated here in that State’s and we can have some.

Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before?

Randi Weingarten, the New Yorker who is rising to become president of the American Federation of Teachers, says she wants to replace President Bush’s focus on standardized testing with a vision of public schools as community centers that help poor students succeed by offering not only solid classroom lessons but also medical and other services.

…“Can you imagine a federal law that promoted community schools — schools that serve the neediest children by bringing together under one roof all the services and activities they and their families need?” Ms. Weingarten asked in the speech.

“Imagine schools that are open all day and offer after-school and evening recreational activities and homework assistance,” she said. “And suppose the schools included child care and dental, medical and counseling clinics.”

How has nobody thought of this before? We’ll simply place all economic and social activities under the purview of these “schools.” Services will be allocated according to the discretion of “teachers.” Workers (everyone) will be told what jobs they must do within the “school.” In order to ensure fairness, private economic activity will be strictly prohibited. Besides, money will be abolished anyway.

I have a good feeling about this.

I’ve often wondered what it would take to dislodge the government monopoly on education. Apparently it takes a catastrophic natural disaster:

NEW ORLEANS The storm that swamped this city three years ago also effectively swept away a public school system with a dismal record and faint prospects of getting better. Before Hurricane Katrina, educator John Alford said, he toured schools and found “kids just watching movies” in classes where “low expectations were the norm.”

Now Alford is one of many new principals leading an unparalleled education experiment, with possible lessons for troubled urban schools in the District and elsewhere. New Orleans, in a post-Katrina flash, has become the first major city in which more than half of all public school students attend charter schools.

For these new schools with taxpayer funding and independent management, old rules and habits are out. No more standard hours, seniority, union contracts, shared curriculum or common textbooks. In are a crowd of newcomers — critics call them opportunists — seeking to lift standards and achievement. They compete for space, steal each other’s top teachers and wonder how it is all going to work.

“Opportunist” is intended to be an insult, but I think it should be considered praise.  It is a good thing that people are looking for an opportunity to provide quality education where previously government monopoly ensured there was none.

…Some critics call the charter invasion of New Orleans a challenge to democratic values. Writing about New Orleans in a new book, Leigh Dingerson, education team leader for the Center for Community Change in the District, says Louisiana school authorities have “opened a flea market of entrepreneurial opportunism that is dismantling the institution of public education in New Orleans.”

You know what I call “dismantling the institution of public education?”  Progress.

One of the problems with government run education is that, without any built-in, systematic mechanism for holding schools accountable, all kinds of half-baked, feel-good policies get propped up by liberal educrats. It is rare, however, to find policies so blatantly racist as those currently being promoted in San Francisco.

…A new grading system will expose schools - even the popular, high-scoring ones - that are failing to address the institutional racial inequities within their walls.

“The issues we’re dealing with are capital D Democracy issues,” said Tony Smith, deputy superintendent of instruction, innovation and social justice, and the plan’s architect.

The question, however, is how to solve those deep-rooted societal problems that are playing out in schools. So far, no urban district has bridged the achievement gap or created schools of equal quality for children regardless of their race or income.

The solution, according to the superintendent’s plan, starts with a top-down acknowledgement that the schools are contributing to the inequities in society, Smith said.

Each school will be judged by how well it “serves each and every student based on that school’s ability to disrupt the historically predictive power of racial, ethnic, linguistic and socio-economic student attributes,” according to the plan.

Deputy superintendent of instruction, innovation and social justice? Barf.

The real objective here is not what it seems Educating children is not this educrat’s goal; advancing the liberal agenda is. Notice where he contends that the first step is to admit that education is institutionally racist. This is a classic liberal ploy whereas they attempt to get one liberal assumption accepted by default by advancing a completely different proposal. Once that proposition is accepted, liberals are then free to engage in all manner of social engineering, all in the name of correcting this “historic racism.”

Furthermore, this policy is inherently racist. What has individual performance to do with the larger averages of some identity group if there is no causal relationship? Unless we are to believe that different races are more or less capable of performing than other racial groups, it makes no sense to focuse on something as irrelevant as race? All students should be held to high standards, not some to lower standards than others because they belong to a certain race. This policy, like so much of liberal identity politics, will dice people up into little groups and exacerbate racial distinctions for no reason. So much for the color-blind dream.

The fight against the myth of global warming has seen much progress in 2007. More and more scientists are speaking out against the intimidation and political deceptions behind the scam. But now is not the time to rest on our laurels. We are in grave danger of losing the next generation as the grip of government propaganda on our children continues to advance the global warming agenda. Here’s an example of how this is accomplished, via the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (Hat tip: Michelle Malkin):

Dear Fifth/Sixth Grade Educators,

We invite your students to participate in the annual Environmental Pathways statewide poster and poetry/prose exhibit. The theme of the 2008 event will be ?Global Warming ? What Can We Do?? focusing on the importance of clean air and protecting our environment.

We ask that you use our educational packet, ?Environmental Pathways - Youth Investigating Pollution Issues in Illinois,? in your classroom during the month of January. Following this year’s theme, emphasis will be on air pollution issues and global warming.

We believe that the creation of posters and written works gives your students an opportunity to express and share, on a deeper and more personal level, what they have learned. The student exhibit also draws attention to environmental issues.

Here’s what I learned expressed on a deeper and more personal level:

Roses are red,
Liberals are too.
Global warming’s a sham,
So they can regulate you.

Educrat silliness:

Under a new school rule, students at Hobbton High School are not allowed to wear items with flags, from any country, including the United States.

The new rule stems from a controversy over students wearing shirts bearing flags of other countries.

. . .The superintendent of schools in Sampson County calls the situation unfortunate, but says educators didn?t want to be forced to pick and choose which flags should be permissible.

What kind of message does it send when government run schools won’t even allow the American flag on student clothing? When the people charged with educating future generations of Americans can’t even handle “picking and choosing” to allow students to wear American flag shirts, is it any wonder that the jihadists think they can browbeat us into submission? Are we really so incapable of standing up for America?

Hat tip: John Locke Foundation

Further illustrating the descent of our government run schools into rampant moonbattery, a 13-year-old boy has been suspended for doodling that most vile of images, that of a gun!

Officials at an Arizona school suspended a 13-year-old boy for sketching what looked like a gun, saying the action posed a threat to his classmates.

The boy’s parents said the drawing was a harmless doodle and school officials overreacted.

“The school made him feel like he committed a crime. They are doing more damage than good,” said the boy’s mother, Paula Mosteller.

The drawing did not show blood, bullets, injuries or target any human, the parents said. And the East Valley Tribune reported that the boy said he did not intend for the picture to be a threat.

…Chandler district spokesman Terry Locke said the crude sketch was “absolutely considered a threat,” and that threatening words or pictures are punishable.

The only thing that should be considered a threat here is the continued attempts by educrats to criminalize the childhood behavior of boys.

Hat tip: Moonbattery