The Deteriorating American Educational System

Our schools have become the new battleground in the war over which values our society will embrace as a standard or whether we will hold to any values or standards at all. Activists have long recognized that the way to alter the course of a nation is to gain control of the classroom, and use it as a platform to indoctrinate the next generation. In Massachusetts, a recent grade school class began their school year with lectures about the "normal" and "acceptable" practices of homosexuality, lectures given, no less, by homosexual teachers.

Liberals cannot keep their hands off our children -- or, more correctly, the billions of tax dollars our children generate for them. Gross signs of public school deterioration have begun in spades, and despite this knowledge by leftist academia, still they refuse to admit that they are being destroyed by their own hands.

Opposing school-choice initiatives

At the center of all that afflicts our schools is a denial by Democrats of free choice and their opposition of any legislation that would give parents greater opportunity to choose private over government education for their children.. Democrats resort to false charges about the Republican record on education because they have no new ideas about how to improve our children's schools. Even if they did, they wouldn't dare say so for fear of angering one of their Party's largest contributors -- the National Education Association (NEA). Bill Clinton said it best himself: "I won't [make] any education decisions that you're not a part of making. I won't forget the people that brought me to the White House" (Bill Clinton, NEA PAC meeting, 12/12/91).

Liberals are not committed to education, but rather are committed to more government spending on more government programs with more control of education being vested in the federal government. Quite simply, the Democrats do not want you to have choices in your childrens's education.

School choice is not only popular among parents, it is successful in providing children a better education

According to a Gallup poll conducted May 1996, nearly half of parents with children in public schools think government should provide funds for students to attend private school.
Cleveland, Ohio's program to allow children from lower-income homes to attend private, religious schools through state vouchers worth $2,250 a year exceeded expectations. More than 6,000 families applied for only 2,000 available vouchers, and one mother said the program came none too soon for her child: "The situation in the public schools is so scary sometimes, I really don't have the trust to send my baby there. But I didn't know what else to do until this idea." (The Washington Post, 9/10/96)
A study conducted by Harvard University and the University of Houston found students participating in a Milwaukee, Wisconsin school choice program scored 12 percent higher in math skills and 5 percent higher in reading skills than similar children attending the city's public schools (NBC Nightly News, 9/3/96).

Democrats pretty consistently support keeping federal control via U.S. Department of Education and are strong defenders of the NEA and teacher's unions who are controlling and narrow special interest groups. These socialist groups want more kids in public schools as they sees public schools as vital to creating "the village of America." Why do you suppose they would take such a position? The answer is money for campaigns.

The more kids there are in public schools, the more teachers who will be in public schools.
The more teachers there are the more money the teachers union gets. The higher their wages, the more the union gets.
The more immigrant children there are... the more higher paid bilingual teachers there are... more money goes to unions.
The more money the unions get, the more money goes into the Democratic election funds.

More than a decade ago, Dr. George Roche foresaw what loomed on the horizon in the area of education, but so far his warnings have likewise been ignored. In 1985 he wrote: "I have become increasingly more convinced that federal efforts to intervene in the workings of the nation's school systems are ill-advised, wasteful, and counter-productive...[they are] part of the problems plaguing America's educational systems, rather than part of the solution. The federal education bureaucracy...has become the captive of misguided and misinformed "educationists" who have sacrificed traditional instruction in the "three R's" and respect for Western cultural heritage in favor of pop-psychology and behavior modification as the goals of schooling... Increasingly over the last few decades, the education bureaucracy has come to believe that they, not parents, know best how to educate America's children. They have come to see themselves as "change agents" whose mission is to reform outmoded notions children have picked up from their parents and substitute instead a new system of values...And this questionable enterprise has been fostered and financed by the federal education establishment."

Opposing school-choice initiatives

Bill Clinton signed the Goals 2000 law on March 31, 1994, creating new education bureaucracies and facilitating federal control of local education institutions.

Outcome based education.
No competition allowed. Too harmful to kids psyches.
Children not graded on academic achievement, but on effort.
Peer pressure used to keep individualism out of the classroom
Children are being taught there are no absolutes, that fact is nothing more than someones opinion.
Families being coerced into divulging personal family data under penalty of being uncooperative with the school.
More and more underminine of parental authority... abortions-okay... body piercing-okay. When teachers discover parents have punished a child they are reported to child protective agencies or the police.

Americans Go To War for Their Schools

In contrast to this government run educational bureaucracy, Republicans generally want to return control to parents, teachers, local school boards and, through them, to communities and local taxpayers.