SCHOOLS AND THE LEFT

One characteristic of the radical left is that it doesn't learn from its mistakes. (This is hardly an original observation.) Invariably, the explanation for a failure is that the Republicans or the fascists or the reactionaries wouldn't allow the left's plans to be fully implemented. Obama's $900 billion stimulus plan failed to pull us out of the 2008 crash, we are told, because it wasn't big enough. Roosevelt was unable to end the Great Depression even after a dozen years of trying because he just wasn't permitted to expand the federal government as much as he wanted to, and as much as it needed to be. We are already hearing that the various nightmares of Obamacare are occurring because what we really need is a single-payer system, but those darn insurance companies and doctors and hospitals and pharmaceutical companies are just so greedy and rapacious that the Democrats are not allowed to institute what is necessary.

The left's ideas, in other words, never fail. They cannot fail, because they are never judged empirically. They are the product of an ideology and since that ideology must be correct, the problem always resides in the incomplete or faulty implementation of whatever was tried. No matter how many times left-wing ideas are implemented, they fail, but that can never be because the ideas themselves are incorrect. Rent control ALWAYS results in housing shortages and higher rents, but to the left, the problem is that the rental market has never been regulated enough. Socialism impoverishes people wherever it is tried, but that's only because we've never really done it right.

I mention this now because Philadelphia's public schools are in the paper again, as they are every August. The amount of money spent on schools across Pennsylvania, including Philadelphia, never goes down. It goes up every year. And yet, every year, there is a “funding crisis.” We need more money. Our children are being “short-changed.” Those Republicans in Harrisburg don't care about our children, probably because many of those Republicans are white and many of our children are black.

Philadelphia has been run by leftist Democrats for more than sixty years, and the annual “funding crisis” is a perfect example of the ideologically-driven politics I'm talking about. The Philly schools get worse every year, in terms of safety, in terms of educating children, in terms of the deterioration of the buildings and assets. By virtually every objective measure, Philly schools are worse this year than last year, and much worse than thirty years ago. And yet, nothing ever changes. THE PEOPLE WHO RUN OUR SCHOOLS WILL DO NOTHING DIFFERENTLY. Parents groups, politicians, bureaucrats, community activists, teachers and their unions---all of them are in lockstep on this point. Nothing must change.

This is the reason for the “funding crisis.” If you fail every year, and your results are worse every year, and you won't change anything you are doing, then the only defense you have is the claim that you don't have enough money to do the job right. And this is the argument, every year. Those bastards won't fund our schools! We need more money!

Over the past forty years, the money spent on public education in America (in real, inflation-adjusted dollars) has quadrupled; class sizes have been cut in half. I don't know the exact numbers for Philly in particular but I would be shocked if they were substantially different from the national picture. After all this, public education continues to deteriorate, steadily, largely because the money is not being spent on actual education. It is spent on increased salaries (especially benefits), for teachers and administrators, on counselors and social workers and various types of education Ph.D.s, on free transportation, on baby-sitting functions, on “free” lunches and breakfasts and dinners, on anti-bullying programs, health fairs and other liberal indoctrination schemes, on sports, and on a myriad of other boondoggles.

(I cannot resist mentioning the pitifully incompetent Arlene Ackerman, who served less than three years [2009 – 2011] as Superintendent of Schools at $350,000 per year, received a million dollar buyout to get rid of her, and then filed for unemployment compensation. This is typical of how money is spent on “education” in a city like Philly.)

The problem with public education in Philadelphia, and in many other big Democratic cities around the country, is that the people who run these towns do not really care much about education. They care about a lot of other things, and in order to get money for those other things, they say the other things are “education.” They care a lot about those other things. As for the actual teaching of children, well, not so much.

Copyright2014MichaelKubacki