Stossel and the Libertarian Ethos

John Stossel's new book Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity: Get Out The Shovel, Everything You Know is Wrong is being touted as I type here on CSPAN2.

Stossel's take on the overwhelming failure of America's public school system, especially the primary and secondary schools, is instructive. His ABC-TV comparison between NYC's public and Catholic school system is crushing. NYC spends $13,000 per student in its public primary and secondary schools, versus $5000 for private Catholic schools, supported by taxpayers who pay extra money just to avoid the public schools their taxes subsidize. The graduation rate for the Catholic schools is 98%, for the public schools 49%. The NYC example matches roughly what takes place in DC, where parents compete to pay for a Catholic education their kids could get free in the crime-ridden public schools.

Much of this is due to public teacher's unions such as NEA and AFTA, parasitic entities which dumb down students, avoid accountability, and function as a monopoly where incompetents [apologies to the many hard-working union members, but your unions are DESTROYING America's public education] continue to motor on punching the time clock with no possibility of removal---tenure for illiterates, in some cases. [The feckless NEA and AFTA picketed Stossel in NYC and challenged him to teach a week in one of their schools. Stossel accepted the dare.]

The public school teachers do make the point that they cannot throw the kids out of school and therefore there is a lower graduation rate. This absurdity apparently passes for reasoning by the NYC public teacher corps. Stossel, however, agrees that the fact that Catholic school teachers can discipline and eject fractious or criminal students actually makes the student body more studious, well-behaved and boosts attendance.

But the worst part of the public school catastrophe afflicting the nation is the inverted pyramid of bureaucrats perched on top of relatively competent teachers. The Seattle School System actually has an incompetent barely literate Doctor of Psychology [I guess literacy is no longer a requirement for a psych PhD in many programs] named Caprice Hollins, whom I blogged about earlier today. This functionary put out a memo concerning rules about Cultural Racism that called planning for the future and mentioning words like flesh or nude "racist." I lost the link, but it's George Orwell's Animal Farm come true.

Stossel is worth a read and I'm going to buy his book, even if occasionally he says
"The War on Drugs is far more harmful than the drugs," which is an exaggeration even if it contains a germ of truth.