America's Educational Berlin Wall

A recent piece in USA Today reports an educational story that has unfolded over the year (so far) that started with school closures and "fifteen days to flatten the curve" -- and is still going on anywhere the public sector unions run everything: Catholic schools have been operating safely while public schools have been effectively closed.

The article is far from perfect: It frames the outcome in leftist "educational inequality" terms and doesn't even raise the issue of privatizing government schools. And it lumps together education with various welfare programs the government delivers through the educational system.

What it does do is provide an example, however unacknowledged, of the superiority of free enterprise in delivering important goods and services -- such as education and child care -- even during a pandemic.

The contrast within the space of these two paragraphs is startling:

Image by CDC, via Unsplash, license.

Catholic schools in all 50 states opened this fall for in-person learning where the local government officials would allow it. And where they would not, parochial schools fought hard for the right [sic] to open. Meanwhile, teachers' unions have taken the opposite approach. They've fought every effort to get kids back in school and continually moved the goalposts, despite the facts, science and the increasingly loud and unified voice of the scientific and medical community arguing that kids belong in school. Where I live, not a single public school has opened -- apart from for a minute fraction of students in some grades. Not even for children with the most severe of learning disabilities or other challenges such as extreme food insecurity and homelessness.

Public school teachers, despite being placed at the front of the line for the vaccine and successfully pushing to get ahead of independent schoolteachers and daycare workers who have been at their posts for months, are now lobbying local school boards against normal re-opening in the fall. Before they return to the classroom, they want districts to meet fantasy benchmarks like two weeks of zero transmission and total child vaccination. This when vaccine studies have yet to be conducted on children and the timeline to vaccinate adults looks like it will stretch to the end of the year. Their latest demands could mean that the millions of public-school kids who are still out of school might face another year or more of "remote learning."

Another year or more of "remote learning?" What the hell?

In any private industry -- meaning neither owned nor effectively run by the government through regulations -- any worker who behaved the way the "teachers" unions are now would have been fired long ago. Why? Because private businesses exist to earn their owners and workers a livelihood via trade with their customers.

Capitalism makes this possible by ensuring that transactions between parties be by mutual consent -- which would mean that the parents wouldn't be forced to give money to people who, as AOC might put it, "refuse to work."

Instead, in the name of guaranteeing an education for every child, we have a system in which people are pickpocketed whether they have children or not and teachers are paid, whether they teach well, teach poorly, or don't teach at all. The long-running school closures only make this obvious: Our schools have been overcharging us and failing us for decades, as witness the line in the article about teaching "on a dime." The idea that education is so important we need the government to provide it has been exposed for the lie that it is.

Education is too important to leave to government officials and their entitled union henchmen: America must free its children from the socialist education model now.

-- CAV