Education Issues

By Liz Michael

Education Choice. More money not the answer. Breakup of the Los Angeles Unified School District. Education Tax credits. Social Promotion.

How can governments increase student achievement, lower dropout rates, reduce violence and improve teacher performance? Get out of the way, that's how! The problems in our schools have their root in special interest domination, union bosses, bloated bureaucracies and corrupt school officials. There is no other way to cure our educational ills than to allow and encourage competition with public schools. Our responsibility as a society is not to preserve public schools at all costs, but to educate our children, regardless of how this is accomplished. We cannot as a society continue to fund failure.

A Radical Restructuring

Parents and children should be given full control and authority to choose the school which the child shall attend, and also given full control of the educational dollar. Full control, not control of a bureaucratically emaciated dollar. And I would legislate complete parental choice of where and how their child should be educated.

Complete Parental Choice

Under a Complete Choice educational system, questions like prayer in school, sex education, racial quotas and the ethnic makeup of schools, and the education of immigrants would become matters of choice: what could not be offered in a public school would be offered in a private school or in home schooling, and the parents' dollars which would have gone to public schools should by right be allowed to be spent in private facilities. After all, IT IS THE PARENTS' MONEY, not the schools'. The dumbing down of American students and the attempt to endocrinate them instead of teaching them how to learn, would cease if a policy of Complete Choice were followed nationwide.

Return control of schools to the parents and the community. As opposed to a system where education is dependent upon various state and federal monies and mandates, education should be returned to the community, where only the parents, students, and teachers have control over the process. School boards should be elected by a vote of the parents and not anyone else's vote. It takes a family to raise a child, and yes it takes a village, but it does not take a government bureaucrat.

EDUCATION TAX EXEMPTIONS AND CREDITS

Parents should recieve full state tax credits and exemptions for any expenses used to educate their children for pre-school, K through 12, and the first four years of college. If we as a society really believe in education as a priority, we ought to enable and encourage parents to fully exercise this responsibility.

Abolish the Los Angeles Unified School District

I support the state outright legislating that a Unified School District managing unit be MANDATED to be below a certain size. If small class sizes are ideal, and I believe they are, then certainly small school districts are as well. Local cities and communities within the L. A. Unified should be broken off into school districts encompassing their own communities, with their own elections. And the City of Los Angeles rightly needs no fewer than 6 separate school districts, 2 for the San Fernando Valley, 2 for the central area of Los Angeles, one for the Westside and one for the Harbor. Additionally, unincorporated East Los Angeles is large enough to merit its own district. I would leave to the cities how they should break up L. A. Unified: but I would mandate at the state level that they break it up. I see no defense for permitting L. A. Unified to be allowed to continue to exist.

Ban "Social Promotion"

About 350,000 students in the Los Angeles Unified School District would be held back a grade if Social Promotion was dropped, according to the LAUSD. This is not only an indication that the LAUSD is incapable of educating our children and must be scrapped, but it alerts us to the fact that so-called "Social Promotion" of failing students must be banned at the state level. Social promotion is fraud: a fraudlent device used by school bureaucrats to con us into thinking they have done their duty.

Restore the Original Intent of Head Start

Today, Head Start has devolved into a nutritional and glorified babysitting program. Its original intent was to be a literacy and mathematics enhancement program designed to successfully lead pre-schoolers into grade school. Given that these programs, although funded by the federal government, are operated at the local level, we as a state can and should mandate that Head Start programs in our state be mandated to provide substantial literacy and math education to our pre-school children.

Abolish the Department of Education

I advocate elimination of the federal Department of Education and the abolition the Goals 2000 program. I have supported a voucher system in the past, and would support it to restore some educational choices, but the concept of voucher does not sufficiently portray what it is that I am advocating. Education cannot be macromanaged by an expensive federal or state bureaucracy: it must be something controlled by parents, students, and educators themselves. That can only effectively be done one way: give most the tax money back to local communities and let parents attend to the management of that situation, with a parent having an irrevocable right to opt into any educational institution which will accept their child.

The Ideal of Education and the Global Responsibilty

I forsee a fabric of public, parochial, and sundry private school systems, with all benefiting from the competition between them. For too long, bureaucrats, politicians and unions have connived this "them vs. us" scenario between public and private schools. This is wrong. The responsibility of educating our children is a universal responsibility. It is not just a responsibility to support public school children, and defintiely not a duty to protect public institutions. It is a responsibility to see that ALL OUR CHILDREN, regardless of whether they attend a public or non-public institution, are educated. This is not "Them vs. Us", or "Public vs. Private". WE ARE ALL "US" in this situation. And we have a responsibility which transcends what we now know as "government".

But can a publicly supported Public-Private mix work in the inner city?

Having seen private, low cost schools work in the inner city, my answer is an unqualified yes. A good neighborhood school is not that expensive to run, and is fully controlled by the parents and teachers locally instead of being dominated by bureaucrats in an ivory tower afar off. Moreover, superior, committed schools will find themselves very able to get corporate sponsorship. Moreover, given the increase in technology advances, having some corporate run schools in the mix which specialize in these technologies, particularly at the high school level, makes all the sense in the world.

Some of the best private schools there are, the schools of the Archdiocese, are also some of the least expensive to attend. Almost all private schools take a certain number of legitimate charity and poverty students on scholarships: guaranteeing the poor an education under Complete Choice will be very doable, much more doable than guaranteeing adequate public schools have proven to be.

I oppose the CTA Initiative and Proposition 26

I oppose any attempt by the education monopoly to force new taxes and bonds on the populace without clear, convincing consent. Two-thirds consent is sufficient consent, and if a school district has a legitimate proposal, should not be difficult to attain. Thus, I oppose Proposition 26.

The CTA initiative, being circulated and likely to appear on the November ballot, would commit the State of California to a given level of education funding commensurate with national funding of schools. There are strategic problems with this concept. One, funding is not the real problem with the schools: the government monopoly on school funding is the problem. Unless this monopoly is broken, and educators are allowed to compete for taxpayer education dollars, no amount of money will solve the problems in our schools. I'm not opposed to more omney, but it needs to be spent in a different way than it currently is. Two, this initiative prevents money saved in other parts of government to be spent on education: the initiative require new money. From where will this money come? Tax increases. What if the legislature won't raise taxes? I forsee the CTA going to court to compel the legislature to raise taxes under threat of contempt of court. We can't allow this.

College Education

Through allowing parents to keep more of their earned income through significant tax reductions, we can insure there will be more dollars available for parents to send their children to college. Moreover, much of the high cost of today's education is a direct result of the government subsidy. A college cannot charge its students more than the market will bear, so for all the concern about young people being shut out of college, according to the market that just cannot happen. Scholarships currently available for poor students to get an education will still be there, in greater number than under current policy, with lower taxes, and especially if we directly encourage such giving with tax credits. Good schools will always seek out the best and brightest from the economically disadvantaged class.

The student loan guarantee program seemed like a good idea at the time of initiation. Yet the result has been the federal government picking up the tab for a whole lot of unpaid loans. The number of outright deadbeats are actually extremely few. What really has happened is that defaults of these loans have come by and large through failure of these students to make sufficient income in their first years of employment to meet both their personal expenses and these loans. This indicates that these programs need substantial reevaluation, if it cannot even produce sufficient income for the students under it to pay the bills. I do believe that student aid is another concept which needs to be returned to the states and taken away from the federal government. My personal opinion is that loans are a fiscally unsound way to finance education: outright grants and scholarships, and work programs through the school of attendance, are more financially viable options, and if I'm going to have the State of California finance college education, I'd prefer it be directly with grants and scholarships, and not loans.