Stupid in America

Tonight I saw one of the best documentaries that I've ever seen. ABC's 20/20 with John Stossel ran a documentary about American public education entitled "Stupid in America." I'm a big fan of John Stossel.

If you're not familiar with Stossel, you should check out Give Me a Break. He walks you through how he started out in the 1980s as a consumer advocate reporting on scams. One of the stories I remember most was a piece he ran about abortion clinics. Apparently it was becoming a relatively wide spread problem that these clinics would report that women were pregnant and needed to come in for an abortion when they were really not pregnant at all. Stossel reported on the problem from the consumer's point of view. These women were being cheated, paying for a service that they never received. Stossel hired women to go into abortion clinics and when supplying a urine specimens to the clinic actually supplied the clinic with a sample of Stossel's urine that they were carrying. Something like 6 out of 10 clinics reported, based on a sampling of Stossel's urine, that the woman was pregnant. After finding out about different scams and how businesses were cheating consumers he advocated increased government oversight. He wanted more regulation to solve society's problems. Over time, Stossel decided to revisit scams he had previously busted. He learned that even after the light he had shed on the problems that the situation had not grown much better. He slowly began to learn first hand that increased government regulation was not the answer to everything. He became far more libertarian in his beliefs and became a firm believer that government has a role but it's not to increase regulation to solve any and all of society's ills.

Now that you know who he is, back to Stossel's current story. Stossel once again lays out a very compelling case. In this instance, how forcing children to go to a single school without having a choice is a government monopoly. He compares it to AT&T back in the 1980. He argues that consumers (in this case the children being sent to often failing government schools) would be far better off given choices in the education market just as they're better off given a choice of Verizon, Cingular, Sprint, T-Mobile, and so many other mobile phone carriers these days as opposed to being stuck with a single provider no matter how poor they may be.

I hope people don't get me wrong. I don't hate public schools. My mom was a public school teacher for 30 some odd years. Both of her parents were public school teachers. I have numerous aunts and uncles that were teachers, a sister-in-law that was a teacher, and lots of friends. I'm a product of a public school. 1st through 12th grade I attended public school in what most people would say is one of the worst possible places for it - south Mississippi. But my experience wasn't a horror story. By and large I had teachers that cared and other students around me that challenged me.

Stossel went to one of the top public schools in New Jersey, supposedly the state with the highest rated public schools in the nation. Stossel asked what about the purpose of the Bill of Rights and one of the causes of the Civil War. No one was able to answer. He went to South Carolina which has one of the lowest rated public schools in the nation. He interviewed the state Secretary of Education about the problems. She continually said that the schools there are dramatically improving and have great things in store over the next few years. No acknowledgement of the fact that less than 50% of students entering high school graduate after 4 years there.

He contrasted her attitude with that of a newly elected governor in the state. The governor moved to South Carolina after being elected and upon moving learned that his family was in an underperforming school district. He was then told that whereas everyone else has to send their children to the school in the district where they live, the governor is exempt from that law. Why is what seems to be good enough for everyone else, going to the school in the district in which you live, not good enough for the governor?

I'm not going to take any more time than I already have to recap Stossel's arguments. Read his article. The whole point of this was to say that education in America is a major problem and something needs to be done to address the problem. This would be one of my other first initiatives as governor. People seem to agree that the governor's children deserve better that our current system; they deserve a choice. Like the South Carolina governor, I just happen to agree that your children deserve a choice as well.