Response to article written by John Stossel

I would like our first topic of discussion to involve the state of public schools and the role of government in providing education for its citizens. Please read the articles posted and provide comments of them individually or by making a general comment in response to my post. Thank you all for your participation. I think we all can learn a lot from each other and have some fun in the process.

-Jonathan

Learning to read in South Carolina

By John Stossel

Feb 1, 2006

With public schools spending more than $100,000 per student on K-12 education, you'd think they could teach students how to read and write.

South Carolina is one of many states to have trouble with this. It spends $9,000 per student per year, and its state school superintendent told me South Carolina has been "ranked as having some of the highest standards of learning in the entire country." So let's ask the infamous question, "Is our children learning?"

Dorian Cain told me he wants to learn to read. He's 18 years old and in 12th grade, but when I asked him to read from a first-grade level book, he struggled with it.

"Did they try to teach you to read?" I asked him.

"From time to time."

His mom, Gena Cain, has been trying to get him help for years. If Dorian were in private school, or if South Carolina allowed parents to choose schools the way we choose other products and services in life, Dorian and Gena would be "customers" and able to go elsewhere -- if any school were dumb enough to serve a customer as poorly as Dorian has been served. But since Gena is merely a taxpayer, forced to pay for the public schools whether they do her any good or not, she can't even demand a better education for her son. "You have to beg," she said. "Whatever you ask for, you're begging. Because they have the power." They do. What are you going to do -- go elsewhere? Gena can't afford that.

Gena's begging eventually got results -- just not results that helped her son. What the school bureaucrats did was hold meetings to talk about Dorian. (Bureaucrats are good at holding meetings.) At the meeting we watched, lots of important people attended: a director of programs for exceptional children, a resource teacher, a district special education coordinator, a counselor and even a gym teacher. The meeting went on for 45 minutes.

"I'm seeing great progress in him," said the principal. "So I don't have any concerns."

Well, Gena still had a concern: Her son could barely read.

Was Dorian just incapable of learning? No. ABC News did see great progress in him -- when we sent him to a private, for-profit tutoring center. In just 72 hours of tutoring, Sylvan Learning Center brought Dorian's reading up more than two grade levels.

In 72 hours, a private company did what South Carolina's government schools could not do in over 12 years.

President Bush's answer to school systems that pass students like Dorian on to the next grade year after year was "No Child Left Behind." It demands that states test students, and it establishes consequences for schools whose students consistently do poorly. Teachers in at least one South Carolina school responded to the pressures of the law by giving some students the answers to the test in advance, said Dale Hammond, grandmother of one such boy. "They were teaching him to cheat!" she told me.

She promptly pulled her grandson out of that government school and enrolled him in private school, but most parents can't afford that. Once you've been taxed to support the public schools and other wastes of public money, you don't have a lot left to spring for private school tuition.

But there is good news, said the state school's superintendent: South Carolina is seeing great progress in some areas. "We are ranked No. 1 in the country," she bragged, "on improvement on SAT."

That's great. But when you're ranked at the bottom, improvement doesn't mean much, and South Carolina, even after its "No. 1 improvement" is still last among states. SATs don't make for perfect comparisons because states have different participation rates, but South Carolina's participation rate is about average, and yet its students perform well below the average.

That's not good. Yet the superintendent said, "We are making tremendous progress in South Carolina, and we're very proud."

In government monopolies, that's how bureaucrats think.

Award-winning news correspondent John Stossel is co-anchor of ABC News "20/20" and author of "Give Me a Break."

Trapped in the wrong government school

By John Stossel

Jan 25, 2006

If you're a public-school student, your chances in life may be largely dependent on where you live -- not just which country, not just which state, but which little bureaucratic zone.

In San Jose, Calif., many parents want to get their kids in Fremont Union schools because they're so much better than neighboring schools. So parents sometimes cheat to get their kids in. At least cheating is what local officials call it. Steve Rowley, district superintendent, said, "We have maybe hundreds of kids who are here illegally, under false pretenses."

Illegally. False pretenses. Sounds like the kids are criminals. All they're doing is trying to get a good public-school education. Don't the public schools' defenders insist all children have a right to a good public-school education?

Inspector John Lozano goes door to door to check if kids really live where they say they do.

At one house, a mother and daughter answer the door, so Lozano sees that the daughter is there, but he still tells them that he needs to look inside the house to make sure. The school district police can go into your daughter's bedroom, even go through drawers and closets. "Well," he said, "we have a computer, we have some 'Seventeen' magazines. We have pictures of the student and her friends on the wall."

So she passed the inspection.

But then he went to an address listed by Esterlita Tapang, whose grandson attends a Fremont Union high school. He told the man who answered the door, "She said she lives here and her grandson is going to live here so he can go to the high school." The man shook his head and said she didn't live there. "Caught," Lozano told us. "She's definitely caught!"

Granted, Tapang broke the rules. The rules said her grandson, because of where he lived, wasn't entitled to the quality education Fremont Union schools provide. But which is worse: a system that traps students in bad schools, or a grandmother who lies to save her grandson from being denied a decent education? I asked her, "Isn't it creepy that they force you to go to the black market to get your kid a better education?"

She thought it was. "I was crying in front of this 14-year-old," said the grandmother. "Why can't they just let parents get in the school of their choice?"

Why can't they? Changing schools can change a child's life. In Florida, Patty Bower's kids were stuck in a school that wasn't teaching them. But then they got vouchers, which let them attend a private school that works with kids who have special needs.

"Joey has been brought up four grade levels in reading," Bowers said. "He's gone from C's, and D's to being an honor roll student." But the Florida Supreme Court this month killed a similar choice program, and Patty fears her kids will soon be forced back into public school. "If they take the McKay scholarship away, I don't think -- I'm sorry. I don't think Joey will finish school."

Why can't she choose her child's school? Most countries that beat America on international tests give their students that choice. In Belgium, the government spends less than American schools do on each student, but the money is attached to the kids. So they can go wherever they want -- to a state-run school, a Montessori school, or even a religious school.

"I wouldn't send my child to an American public school," said Maria Loth. "Not even for a million dollars."

Her son lives in Belgium now, but when he was 6, his family lived in America. "In America, I had to beg, please, please give me good school for my child. And here in Belgium, they're all over the place."

That's right. In public education, our land of the free is now a bunch of local fiefs, where petty-bureaucrats-turned-lords-of-the-manor decide whether you can get a decent education, and parents must go to them, begging for their children's future. Meanwhile, in Belgium and much of the rest of the world, students and their parents have the freedom to choose their schools -- and the opportunity that comes with that freedom.

Award-winning news correspondent John Stossel is co-anchor of ABC News "20/20" and author of "Give Me a Break."

Myth: Schools don't have enough money

By John Stossel

Jan 18, 2006

"Stossel is an idiot who should be fired from ABC and sent back to elementary school to learn journalism." "Stossel is a right-wing extremist ideologue."

The hate mail is coming in to ABC over a TV special I did Friday (1/13). I suggested that public schools had plenty of money but were squandering it, because that's what government monopolies do.

Many such comments came in after the National Education Association (NEA) informed its members about the special and claimed that I have a "documented history of blatant antagonism toward public schools."

The NEA says public schools need more money. That's the refrain heard in politicians' speeches, ballot initiatives and maybe even in your child's own classroom. At a union demonstration, teachers carried signs that said schools will only improve "when the schools have all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber."

Not enough money for education? It's a myth.

The truth is, public schools are rolling in money. If you divide the U.S. Department of Education's figure for total spending on K-12 education by the department's count of K-12 students, it works out to about $10,000 per student.

Think about that! For a class of 25 kids, that's $250,000 per classroom. This doesn't include capital costs. Couldn't you do much better than government schools with $250,000? You could hire several good teachers; I doubt you'd hire many bureaucrats. Government schools, like most monopolies, squander money.

America spends more on schooling than the vast majority of countries that outscore us on the international tests. But the bureaucrats still blame school failure on lack of funds, and demand more money.

In 1985, some of them got their wish. Kansas City, Mo., judge Russell Clark said the city's predominately black schools were not "halfway decent," and he ordered the government to spend billions more. Did the billions improve test scores? Did they hire better teachers, provide better books? Did the students learn anything?

Well, they learned how to waste lots of money.

The bureaucrats renovated school buildings, adding enormous gyms, an Olympic swimming pool, a robotics lab, TV studios, a zoo, a planetarium, and a wildlife sanctuary. They added intense instruction in foreign languages. They spent so much money that when they decided to bring more white kids to the city's schools, they didn't have to resort to busing. Instead, they paid for 120 taxis. Taxis!

What did spending billions more accomplish? The schools got worse. In 2000, five years and $2 billion later, the Kansas City school district failed 11 performance standards and lost its academic accreditation for the first time in the district's history.

A study by two professors at the Hoover Institution a few years ago compared public and Catholic schools in three of New York City's five boroughs. Parochial education outperformed the nation's largest school system "in every instance," they found -- and it did it at less than half the cost per student.

"Everyone has been conned -- you can give public schools all the money in America, and it will not be enough," says Ben Chavis, a former public school principal who now runs the American Indian Charter School in Oakland, Calif. His school spends thousands less per student than Oakland's government-run schools spend.

Chavis saves money by having students help clean the grounds and set up for lunch. "We don't have a full-time janitor," he told me. "We don't have security guards. We don't have computers. We don't have a cafeteria staff." Since Chavis took over four years ago, his school has gone from being among the worst middle schools in Oakland to the one where the kids get the best test scores. "I see my school as a business," he said. "And my students are the shareholders. And the families are the shareholders. I have to provide them with something."

Award-winning news correspondent John Stossel is co-anchor of ABC News "20/20" and author of "Give Me a Break."

Cheating the children

By John Stossel

Jan 11, 2006

Last week, Florida's supreme court ruled that public money can't be spent on private schools because the state constitution commands the funding of only "uniform . . . high-quality" schools. How absurd. As if government schools are uniformly high quality. Or even mostly decent.

Apparently competition, which made even the Postal Service improve, is unconstitutional when it comes to public education in Florida.

Remember when the Postal Service said it couldn't get it there overnight? Then companies like FedEx were allowed to compete. Private enterprise got it there absolutely, positively overnight. Now even the Post Office guarantees overnight delivery sometimes. Competition works.

Why can't education work the same way? If people got to choose their kids' school, education options would be endless. My tiny brain can't begin to imagine the possibilities, but even I can guess there soon would be technology schools, cheap Wal-Mart-like schools, virtual schools where you learn at home on your computer, sports schools, music schools, schools that go all year, schools with uniforms, schools that open early and keep kids later, and, who knows? If there were competition, all kinds of new ideas would bloom.

This already happens overseas, and the results are good.

For "Stupid in America," a special report ABC will air Friday, we gave identical tests to high school students in New Jersey and Belgium. The Belgians trounced the Americans. We didn't pick smart kids in Europe and dumb kids in the United States. The American students attend an above-average school in New Jersey, and New Jersey kids' test scores are above average for America. "It has to be something with the school," said a New Jersey student, "'cause I don't think we're stupider."

She was right: It's the schools. At age 10, students from 25 countries take the same test, and American kids place eighth, well above the international average. But by age 15, when students from 40 countries are tested, the Americans place 25th, well below the international average. In other words, the longer American kids stay in American schools, the worse they do. They do worse than kids from much poorer countries, like Korea and Poland.

This should come as no surprise since public education in the USA is a government monopoly. If you don't like your public school? Tough. If the school is terrible? Tough. Your taxes fund that school regardless of whether it's good or bad.

Government monopolies routinely fail their customers.

Kaat Vandensavel runs a Belgian government school, but in Belgium, school funding follows students, even to private schools. So Vandensavel has to work hard to impress the parents. "If we don't offer them what they want for their child, they won't come to our school." That pressure makes a world of difference, she says. It forces Belgian schools to innovate in order to appeal to parents and students. Vandensavel's school offers extra sports programs and classes in hairdressing, car mechanics, cooking, and furniture building. She told us, "We have to work hard day after day. Otherwise you just [go] out of business."

"That's normal in Western Europe," Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby told me. "If schools don't perform well, a parent would never be trapped in that school in the same way you could be trapped in the U.S."

Vandensavel adds, "America seems like a medieval country . . . a Communist country on the educational level, because there's no freedom of choice -- not for parents, not for pupils."

In kindergarten through 12th grade, that is. Colleges compete, so the United States has many of the most prestigious in the world -- eight of the top 10 universities, on a Chinese list of the world's top 500. (The other two are Cambridge and Oxford.)

Accountability is why universities and private schools perform better. Every day they are held accountable by parents and students, and if they fail the kids, school administrators lose their jobs. Public school officials almost never lose jobs.

Government schools are accountable only to their fellow politicians, and that kind of accountability is virtually no accountability.

The public schools are cheating the children.

Award-winning news correspondent John Stossel is co-anchor of ABC News "20/20" and author of "Give Me a Break."