For Once, the Students Win...

If you've been reading this blog for a while, then you know how I despair about the state of the American education system (both primary schools and secondary schools). One of the major contributing causes to the sorry state of our primary (K-12) schools is the way that the teacher's unions have turned our schools from places that concentrate on teaching kids into places that concentrate on delivering benefits to teachers and the enormous bureaucracy they've managed to build. By any metric one can imagine, the performance of kids coming out of our private schools is just plain awful. If you want proof that it's the schools fault, just look at any alternative to the public schools: Catholic schools, charter schools, private schools, home schooling ... in every case, the students graduating from those alternative schools humiliate the public school graduates – and on average, they do it for a small fraction of what we spend (per student, per year) in our public schools.

Obviously, there something badly broken in our public schools. Reason TV (hosted by Drew Carey) recently published a short documentary on the web that explores one particular example of a failing public school. Like most such stories, if you have any interest in seeing our kids well-educated, your blood will boil as you listen to teacher's representatives fighting hard for their interests – and not at all for the kids' interests. But unlike most such stories, this one has a happy ending. Go watch it. If you have kids in public schools, think about the real hope for change that story demonstrates.

Obama, that self-proclaimed minister of changeyness, unconditionally rules out the sort of positive change happening in the school that Reason profiles. I guess he likes the support of the teacher's unions (which he has) more than he cares about our kids' interests. Of course, those kids (a) can't contribute money to his campaign, and (b) can't vote, which leaves them pretty vulnerable to being out-lobbied by the rich and powerful teacher's unions...