Government-funded “school choice” doesn’t break the system—it spreads it. In this response to John Stossel, I show how subsidies entangle private education in state control, erode true alternatives, and turn real choice into illusion. If you care about markets, freedom, and families. Don’t be fooled by the branding.
Public-Private interaction is like being "a little pregnant" or Lincoln's "house divided" - we must become all one or all the other
Educational vouchers run the risk of being to education what Medicaid is to healthcare
The world of "private" charity delivering services to individuals with disabilities is a disastrously inefficient complex of box-checking and accountability avoidance to garner/retain public funding. George W Bush's utopian vision of compassionate conservative public/private partnerships is a nightmare to navigate. Such would be the fate of education
Exactly, and to a larger extent than people think, it already is. Even with just the voucher and charter schools already in existence, there are serious problems like the box checking and compliance, not to mention the requirements for staffing credentials that rule out potentially great candidates who can't afford, nor want to submit themselves, to "reeducation" to get the credentials govt requires before they can be hired by a recipient org. They call this oversight, I call this gate keeping. What ought to matter most are results and individual experience, plus a clean background check. We are seeing the opposite--credentialing entities pop up, offer loans with questionable terms, to people with few other prospects, then "place" them in jobs they otherwise wouldn't have gotten, with certificates of limited value, and everyone gets their piece of the taxpayer's pie.
I am new to your Substack. What drew me to your work was your article on the defining of education by the state. I thought it was excellent and have shared it with a number of people. I agree with you also on the credentialing issue.
When I moved to Tennessee, I chose not to “transfer” my teaching certificate. I have 34 years experience in education, which includes public, private, and homeschool. I was in the public school classroom for 20 of those years. I have a BS, MA, and an Ed.D. in education. I have five certifications in my previous state and one national board certification. I was Director of a private Christian school and later sat on its board. I currently sit on a county school board. I have served as the board’s legislative liaison for three years. I say all that to say this. If I wanted to obtain my teaching certificate here, I would likely be required, according to a state official, to take the Praxis test (it was called something else when I first started in education). I would have to jump through multiple hoops and be willing to sit through 30 hours of professional development ANNUALLY in order to receive my license and retain it.
Because so much professional development is required by the state, districts often contract it out to private companies for ridiculous amounts of money (i.e., public dollars), resulting in teachers sitting through year after year of, essentially, the same material repackaged under new names. As a board member, I requested to attend one of the PD seminars on teaching methods. It didn’t take long to recognize the methods presented had been around for quite a while. When I questioned this, I was told that new teachers needed this type of professional development. I responded by questioning what they were learning in the Colleges of Education. These methods are not new or rocket science. These are methods they should have learned through their degree programs.
I agree that many of these credential programs are gatekeeping programs. On top of credentialing requirements, many districts do pre-employment surveys, which may or may not be a good thing. Survey questions can be designed to identify certain ideological characteristics that are not desirable to the district, thus providing another form of gatekeeping. I have evaluated some pre-employment surveys which were definitely biased toward teachers of a particular ideological position. I have already taken up too much space here to address another type of gatekeeping program, accreditation.
Thank you for your comment, and for your detailed explanation of how it works--people need to understand this, and as I've not been in the classroom for so long, people have a tendency to think I'm mistaken, or exaggerating.
Well, government has shown itself to be too stupid to protect consumers on a broader scale (harming smart consumers who otherwise might know how), so I'll go with the smaller footprint. :)
Government has fully merged with corporations in a fascist system, and is thus unable to provide protection. In fact, under the guise of security, government ensures our ‘education’ is actually industry brainwashing.
Good point. As my mother pointed out to me during the Dark Ages (1960’s) “He who pays the piper calls the tune.” We taxpayers only think we are the payer. Government money = Government strings.
Exactly. And if you think about it, they put us in a position to want it that way: they take the money by force (don't pay, go to jail); they decide who gets it, why, and how much, and we wouldn’t even KNOW any of those facts unless they were monitoring and collecting data about it. Who doesn't want “oversight” of how our money is being spent? Enter the bureaucrats! If we don’t like what they’re doing, they make it SEE like only choice is to vote for people who will pick different ways for them to redistribute our money. We forget we should be voting for people who will put the chains on GOVT, not on us, and stop taking the money to start with!
You are asking people to accept that their little precious children are not all geniuses and deserving of All the Things and that everyone doesn't get what they want in life just be being nice or "good." If you want them in a private school and they can't pass the entrance exam and you can't afford the tuition, nobody owes you a solution to that problem as a parent.
I don't have much hope that the entitlement culture we live in is going away any time soon. It's so deeply entrenched that a well reasoned post as yours will fall on deaf ears. Sorry to be such a pessimist.
I've lived my whole life with people being envious of things they think were handed to me undeservingly. It's exhausting.
Public-Private interaction is like being "a little pregnant" or Lincoln's "house divided" - we must become all one or all the other
Educational vouchers run the risk of being to education what Medicaid is to healthcare
The world of "private" charity delivering services to individuals with disabilities is a disastrously inefficient complex of box-checking and accountability avoidance to garner/retain public funding. George W Bush's utopian vision of compassionate conservative public/private partnerships is a nightmare to navigate. Such would be the fate of education
Exactly, and to a larger extent than people think, it already is. Even with just the voucher and charter schools already in existence, there are serious problems like the box checking and compliance, not to mention the requirements for staffing credentials that rule out potentially great candidates who can't afford, nor want to submit themselves, to "reeducation" to get the credentials govt requires before they can be hired by a recipient org. They call this oversight, I call this gate keeping. What ought to matter most are results and individual experience, plus a clean background check. We are seeing the opposite--credentialing entities pop up, offer loans with questionable terms, to people with few other prospects, then "place" them in jobs they otherwise wouldn't have gotten, with certificates of limited value, and everyone gets their piece of the taxpayer's pie.
I am new to your Substack. What drew me to your work was your article on the defining of education by the state. I thought it was excellent and have shared it with a number of people. I agree with you also on the credentialing issue.
When I moved to Tennessee, I chose not to “transfer” my teaching certificate. I have 34 years experience in education, which includes public, private, and homeschool. I was in the public school classroom for 20 of those years. I have a BS, MA, and an Ed.D. in education. I have five certifications in my previous state and one national board certification. I was Director of a private Christian school and later sat on its board. I currently sit on a county school board. I have served as the board’s legislative liaison for three years. I say all that to say this. If I wanted to obtain my teaching certificate here, I would likely be required, according to a state official, to take the Praxis test (it was called something else when I first started in education). I would have to jump through multiple hoops and be willing to sit through 30 hours of professional development ANNUALLY in order to receive my license and retain it.
Because so much professional development is required by the state, districts often contract it out to private companies for ridiculous amounts of money (i.e., public dollars), resulting in teachers sitting through year after year of, essentially, the same material repackaged under new names. As a board member, I requested to attend one of the PD seminars on teaching methods. It didn’t take long to recognize the methods presented had been around for quite a while. When I questioned this, I was told that new teachers needed this type of professional development. I responded by questioning what they were learning in the Colleges of Education. These methods are not new or rocket science. These are methods they should have learned through their degree programs.
I agree that many of these credential programs are gatekeeping programs. On top of credentialing requirements, many districts do pre-employment surveys, which may or may not be a good thing. Survey questions can be designed to identify certain ideological characteristics that are not desirable to the district, thus providing another form of gatekeeping. I have evaluated some pre-employment surveys which were definitely biased toward teachers of a particular ideological position. I have already taken up too much space here to address another type of gatekeeping program, accreditation.
Thank you for your comment, and for your detailed explanation of how it works--people need to understand this, and as I've not been in the classroom for so long, people have a tendency to think I'm mistaken, or exaggerating.
Let’s free up consumerism - but consumers are too stupid to protect themselves
Well, government has shown itself to be too stupid to protect consumers on a broader scale (harming smart consumers who otherwise might know how), so I'll go with the smaller footprint. :)
Government is not stupid…it is a well-crafted instrument accomplishing industry objectives.
Government has fully merged with corporations in a fascist system, and is thus unable to provide protection. In fact, under the guise of security, government ensures our ‘education’ is actually industry brainwashing.
Good point. As my mother pointed out to me during the Dark Ages (1960’s) “He who pays the piper calls the tune.” We taxpayers only think we are the payer. Government money = Government strings.
Exactly. And if you think about it, they put us in a position to want it that way: they take the money by force (don't pay, go to jail); they decide who gets it, why, and how much, and we wouldn’t even KNOW any of those facts unless they were monitoring and collecting data about it. Who doesn't want “oversight” of how our money is being spent? Enter the bureaucrats! If we don’t like what they’re doing, they make it SEE like only choice is to vote for people who will pick different ways for them to redistribute our money. We forget we should be voting for people who will put the chains on GOVT, not on us, and stop taking the money to start with!
You are asking people to accept that their little precious children are not all geniuses and deserving of All the Things and that everyone doesn't get what they want in life just be being nice or "good." If you want them in a private school and they can't pass the entrance exam and you can't afford the tuition, nobody owes you a solution to that problem as a parent.
I don't have much hope that the entitlement culture we live in is going away any time soon. It's so deeply entrenched that a well reasoned post as yours will fall on deaf ears. Sorry to be such a pessimist.
I've lived my whole life with people being envious of things they think were handed to me undeservingly. It's exhausting.
The article makes a very important point that repeatedly gets ignored: It’s the schools receiving the vouchers that get to choose, not the parents.