Cheating the children -- Public Education

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....
.... 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.
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.... 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.'
.... 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."
Copyright © 2006 John Stossel
Find this story at: http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/JohnStossel/2006/01/11/181913.html