Schools Are Scaring Voters and Raking in Cash

Out of America’s 3,100 counties, Putnam County has the tenth highest rate of taxation. Yet, as evidenced by the recent increases in property taxes countywide after the school budget elections, we New Yorkers are apparently willing to accept ever-increasing taxes in a shrinking economy. And we are even content to live with the government telling us how to vote and punishing us for not complying.

You see, the school districts do indeed tell us how to vote on school budgets. Our tax dollars, supposedly used for the education of our children, are used to pay for “Vote Yes” advertising that comes in the mail once a year. The schools hold votes while passing out “free” food paid for by funds diverted from education. They pay for “School Spirit Days” that divert instructional time to parading the children around like pawns in order to get more “Yes” votes. It is equivalent to the “bread and circuses” typical of Rome’s decline. You entertain and feed people, they will vote the way you want them to. And, parents attend these events and fall victim to this centuries-old trick.

Cunningly, school districts, using laws pushed by the teachers’ unions, scare the electorate into voting for out-of-control budgets by threatening to cut athletics and even academic programs if budgets fail. Of course, the sky-high teacher salaries remain untouched; students, not highly-paid tenured teachers, suffer the consequences when voters choose to exercise fiscal discipline. Is this a coincidence? The brass-knuckled bosses of the teachers unions know how to hit parents where it hurts. What parents will want to cut their kids’ sports? And so, no matter how dire the economic situation or how poor the quality of their work, the teachers escape unscathed.

And so we allow flagrantly corrupt school budgets to pass annually, and we wonder why our schools are such a mess—and why our state is approaching financial ruin.

As a former teacher, I can dish out all the dirt:

Every year our school districts spend about $20,000 on each Putnam student— and there is no room and board! Is your child, who is plopped in front of televisions and barely taught how to read and write, getting a $20,000 a year education? How is it that parochial schools, for less than a third of the money, time and again produce better performing students?

But accountability never comes because teachers are quite openly taught to impart ideology in your child’s classroom, instead of teaching the three Rs. For example, America’s leading school for educators, Teachers College at Columbia University, openly and proudly teaches a doctrine called “social reconstructionism.” This is a pedagogy that emphasizes politicizing students into socialists instead of teaching them how to think on their own. I would have said this was crazy too, but I had to learn it myself and I have subsequently discovered that most colleges for teachers promulgate the same doctrine.

Google up George S. Counts’ “Dare the Schools Build a New Social Order,” because it is required reading at Columbia, where I received my Masters. In it Counts asserts that schools must “develop a comprehensive theory of welfare, fashion a compelling vision of human destiny, and become less frightened at the bogies of imposition and indoctrination.” Doesn’t sound very democratic, does it?

Teachers are taught to discourage individual achievement and to encourage “group work,” which, in the end, promotes sloth and stifles enterprise.

In fact, some education schools instill the notion that the student who has the worst grades gets the most points from a project, while the “overachieving” student with the best grades gets the least. Is it any wonder that students in China and India are far outpacing Americans in scientific knowledge, and that Americans do not even know the basic facts of their own history?

Schools, especially in the inner city, falsify test scores and attendance records. Special education nationwide is an expensive joke where students that start from behind are perpetually taught less and less, with dwindling expectations for their academic success—and dwindling expectations for their richly compensated teachers. Teachers give out more and more nonsense, easy-tograde assignments to “engage” students instead of teaching them anything useful from which they might learn.

And it shows in the classroom. Your children are being warned of the evils of America and the free enterprise system, instead of being taught the skills to do well in life so that they can actually be in the position to help their fellow man. The school teaches that your religion is a fairy tale, but that Islam is great. And sure it’s important to learn about endangered species, but does that need to be on the lesson plan every week? The school teaches that studio art is as important as math and “creative” writing as knowing how to actually write well. Creative writing is a little easier for the teachers to grade because everything becomes subjective. The teachers don’t have to bother with logic or grammar.

After all this, children go into college, barely knowing how to write or think critically, and receive worthless liberal arts degrees, during which they are encouraged to “find themselves.” This does not lead to gainful employment. Why? Because schools are not teaching students actual useful skills. In America’s leading business schools, half of the enrollment are foreign nationals, and they get all the good jobs. While they learned math and science and developed a work ethic, your child learned how to make worthless PowerPoint slides about why he likes Facebook.

Why do our schools lack commonsense? Because they instill ideologies instead of teaching trades, promote opinions instead of facts, and a skewed set of morals instead of the skill set needed to thrive in a competitive economy. Public schools should exist to empower our children to live productive lives, not to be dependents. As a result, we are creating a culture that is content to be on the government dole, rather than creating and producing. This is antithetical to the American spirit.

Yet every year, the grotesquely large school budgets continue their growth like a cancer. At what point will we say we’ve had enough? At what point will we band together to promote the interests of the children, in the face of the teachers unions and the professional bureaucrats?

James Raio is a writer in the Hudson Valley.