Guest MINDSETTER™ Hinckley: America’s Major Segregation Problem
Sunday, November 11, 2018
The government monopoly on primary and secondary education discriminates against lower and working-class families, a disproportionate amount of who are minorities. There, I said it.
Unless you are a family that can afford 20-60k after tax dollars per kid, per year, chances are, you are stuck in an average-to-poor government school, with your only escape option securing one of the limited scholarships at a private school, enduring financial hardship, if you can, by moving to a pricey suburb or literally “winning the lottery” for a limited slot at a charter school, if they even exist in your district.
Education is the great equalizer, we’ve seen it over and over again, “get a great education, get a great job and live a more successful life”, the facts bear this out, over and over again. Rich people and rich politicians know this, which is why the vast majority either send their kids to private schools at the above-mentioned prices or move to an exclusive town with million dollar plus homes like Barrington, RI, Wellesley or Weston, Mass, where you can actually enjoy a quality public education. If the private schools weren’t better, rich people wouldn’t pass up a “free” government education and opt to spend hard earned after-tax dollars on a private education. Many families will tell you education is the most important investment they will ever make. It is literally “life-changing” for many children. It was for me. Of the 17 years of education I received, my four high school years were private and I learned more in those four years than I did in the thirteen years of public school I attended.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTOnce in a while, our government gets it right and they did so with the Sherman Anti-trust Act, outlawing monopolies. Passed by Congress in 1890 and in part reading:
“to preserve a competitive marketplace and protect consumers from harm.”
I think we can all agree that as students and parents we are consumers of education, whether it’s a private school where your dollars buy an education or a local government school where your tax dollars fund the school. Make no mistake, as a country, we Americans are the largest consumers of public education in the world, spending in the top four, per student, of 32 industrialized nations, yet sadly with all those dollars, we perform at the bottom four of those 32 industrialized nations. I believe lack of competition and choice through government monopoly is at the core of this troubling problem. Remember, kids don’t get a second chance at a good education. Screw it up and the problems will last a lifetime.
We are also the founders and beneficiaries of the largest public welfare system in the world, where our government has launched a war on poverty beginning in the 60”s, spending trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars “to level the playing field” in the form of voucher programs for food, housing, healthcare, even cell phones. Take the SNAP aka “food stamp” program for example, which supplies food to roughly 45 million people a month. In this program, like other government programs, providing the essentials of life, the government doesn’t actually produce, transport or sell the food, however, the government does provide the citizen a voucher to use in the private market to purchase the food. Same with section 8 housing, same with healthcare. Of course, all of these can be determined essential services for life, as I think everyone would agree is a quality education. In fact, I would venture to say that a quality education is a primary right for all citizens, and an essential service that guarantees the success of our democracy. Our forefathers believed this, founding our public education system. I challenge anyone to disagree with this assertion. As it says on the edifice of the Boston Public Library, “the Commonwealth requires the education of the people as a safeguard of order and liberty”. Never has this been more true than today.
In the early days of our industrial revolution, it was imperative that the government make available education to all American’s, despite socio-economic background, realizing it was the key to further a productive workforce. A vast nation with only limited private alternatives, the government got in the education business, big time. A lot has changed since those early years, but how much has our government’s approach to education changed? Today we live in an advanced technological world where innovation has touched all markets and individuals, compressing geography and opening access beyond the prairie school of yesteryear. Yet our government is holding on to it’s 19th and 20th-century primary and secondary educational model and monopoly with an iron grip. It begs a couple of questions. First of all, why does a government that believes in vouchers for food, housing, and healthcare, not believe in a voucher program for education? Why does a government that has outlawed monopolies for the private sector, insist on maintaining one in such an important public sector? How can a monopoly be bad for all markets, but fine for education, which is so critical to our nation’s success?
How can our government overlook the symptoms of a monopoly in our government education system, limited choice, limited access, high cost and low quality, but attack them when it broke up Standard Oil, the Bell’s and stopped countless mergers?
Why have so many of our politicians attended private schools themselves, yet vote against vouchers to private schools for you and me? Why do they send their own children to private schools, while consistently voting to uphold the government monopoly on education, which families can only opt out of if they are rich, connected or lucky?
Sadly, per usual, the answer is money, power and politics. Our leaders, in their massively hypocritical, “do as I say not as I do” behavior have chosen to discriminate against middle and lower income families by tacitly admitting through their actions that our school system is first and foremost an antiquated government jobs program and a distant second, an education service for kids and families that can’t afford to opt out…This is an obvious form of discrimination and segregation as the policy wildly and disproportionally affects minorities, who are mostly sentenced to a very limited choice of failing government schools.
If you don’t believe me, go to any city in America today and look at the complexion of the student body in the government schools, then go to the private schools in that same city and look at the complexion. Furthermore, seek out the hard working lower income and minority families in those cities and ask them if they’d send their kids to one of those private schools, if they had a government voucher to do so? Don’t bother to answer that question, we all know the answer, a resounding yes! The majority would choose the private school over a failing government school.
It’s time to put our children first and level the educational playing field that today is tilting so harshly to the political class, the wealthy, and the connected, yet against the working class, poor and minorities. Let’s stop the political games and vote buying that has turned education into a government jobs program and political action committee. If our country is going to succeed in this century we need to guarantee all citizens, despite, race, creed or socio-economic background access to a choice of schools and quality education.
If we do this, a massive educational marketplace will emerge, that with the influx of hundreds of billions of tax dollars, will certainly lead to innovation, competition, cost savings, diversity and choice, as do all other markets where monopolies are broken and capital is free to flow by consumer choice rather than government edict. Many public government schools will compete and win and many will shutter their doors in lieu of more competitive and quality alternatives. Great teachers will have more choices of where to work and poor teachers won’t.
Lastly, we will see more ACTUAL diversity in the classroom, which I think we can all agree in our vast multi-cultural society, where we all need to learn to get along, would be a great thing…
Barry Hinckley is a Newport-based business leader and former GOP candidate for the United States Senate.
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