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Representative John Boehner declared recently that he “is in” for the new wave of educational reform in this country, which is being spearheaded by the “National School Choice Week” campaign. In a promotional spot for the campaign last month, Mr. Boehner boldly declared, “Hello, I’m John Boehner.”
I sat down with Boehner at his Ohio home to discuss this radical declaration and his sponsorship of “National School Choice Week.”
“We’re not dumb,” Mr. Boehner stated with strict eloquence while we sat for tea and conversation. “It’s the schools that are dumb. We need to put kids in schools that are not dumb.”
Mr. Boehner stood by his notion of increased parental involvement in our brief encounter, pointing out the long, ubiquitous tradition of parental involvement in the kinds of neighborhoods in which parents arrive home from low-wage jobs at 7:30 p.m. after a 16-hour shift and clearly can’t wait to wash up and make it out to the PTA meeting. You know… The bad neighborhoods.
“We simply need to get rid of the schools that are failing and put our kids in schools that aren’t failing. It’s like when you have a bunch of kids smoking pot in your basement. You can’t just take away the pot. You need to privatize the market and push for government to subsidize the small business owners, (ie. your local dealer), while cutting taxes and limiting government as an incentive to stimulate job creation!”
During my visit with Representative Boehner, it became clear that schools in the U.S. are running rampant with good teachers, excellent administrators, and decent budgets. The problem is clearly, and exclusively, the bad schools. The “National School Choice Week” campaign is advocating the idea that the choice of which school a student should attend in the hands of the parents, a prospect which has been thought possible by giving government subsidies. As such, if we take our students out of bad schools, we’ll do away with the only problem in the educational system, right? Still, I couldn’t understand why schools are so tirelessly nefarious, working day after day on ruining our otherwise excellent system.
I sat down with Governor Rick Scott (R- Fl) to discuss the issue of bad schools. Gov. Scott made headlines with his recent proposal of giving students of low socioeconomic standing “school vouchers” to pay for the different options that would allow parents to make a choice as to what school their child can go to.
“The problem, Ronald, is this notion that we should allow our children to be trapped in bad schools. Those schools are evil and they should be banished for all time to an existence best described as an empty shell of their former selves,” the governor told me during our brief interview.
Gov. Scott’s “educational savings account” idea proposes a fiscal product that would allow eligible parents to obtain “up to 85 percent of the state’s per-pupil funding figure.” When asked about whether federal and state representatives who advocate this plan – (largely conservatives and tea baggers, no affiliation) – planned to enact this change before or after they went through with their promise of cutting all the budgets, education included, Gov. Scott excused himself and proceeded to lock himself in the bathroom for several hours — refusing to come out until I left the premises.
So, logically speaking, what is wrong with the idea of reforming our educational system by keeping the actual system in place and just herding our students off to better schools? Is there nothing to lose with shepherding students through the thoroughfares of a fundamentally flawed system until they’re eventually deposited in the slightly more productive tentacles of a larger, low scoring educational beast which consumes academic integrity like a mystical dark mist shrouding a once small, benevolent, defenseless village?
Admittedly, taking children out of bad schools and putting them in good schools is somewhat productive. Giving parents options in choosing their child’s school is honestly a great idea, as proven by the scholarship program instituted in Washington, D.C. Still, by far the best idea I feel anyone has had is simply the thought that education reform strictly involves getting rid of bad schools, as opposed to fixing a fundamentally flawed system at its core: the bad schools we’re trying to get rid of. So while giving options to parents to choose their own child’s education is honestly a great way to further the cause, the biggest step forward in this move to reform the American educational system has been simply identifying the nemesis.
Now we may enact change because we know that evil schools are the only crumbling part of our money hemorrhaging, low scoring, overcrowded, ill-effective, teacher disdaining, savagely under budgeted, horrifically-administrated and often severely corrupted public education; and that change that will allow us to gracefully herd our kids to the better sites of that same system which has clearly worked for so many in the past.
