Private Schools for the Poor, Part II

One thing we know: private schools are for the rich. The poor don't have the resources or the knowledge to educate their children.

So we need a system of free, compulsory government education for children. In fact, it's been enshrined as a right by the United Nations.

But James Tooley in The Beautiful Tree tells us that in the Third World the governments are manifestly failing to educate the children of the poor.

And guess what? The poor are doing just fine. Educational entrepreneurs living in the slums are founding and running private schools for the poor that outperform government schools and nearly approach the performance of private schools for the middle class.

These slum schools charge fees and the poor pay them. In addition, the schools typically offer free education to the children of widows and mothers abandoned by their husbands.

This is earth-shattering news. You mean to say that the poor can afford a basic education for their children? You mean to say that the education from their slum schools is better than the government schools?

Then why are we spending vast sums of money on our own government school system? Isn't the whole idea of government education to provide for the children of the poor? And that we have to put everyone else's children in the same one-size-fits-all system just to make it fair?

Now we find that the poor are perfectly capable of directing and paying for the education of their own children. In fact they are better than the government and its experts. So why are we spending 5 percent of GDP on an education system that underperforms even threadbare schools run by untrained entrepreneurs and uncertified teachers in the slums?

Why indeed?

Why not? Of course government education is worse than the private alternative. And we all know why, instinctively.

The failures of government education stem for a simple fact: the pervasive lack of accountability that characterizes every government school system. Teachers don't turn up. Teachers aren't committed to the students. Schools don't teach what parents want. Teachers' unions make it impossible to fire teachers. Education becomes a patronage system to reward the supporters of politicians.

But there's a bigger problem. And James Tooley illustrates it with the sad story of education in India. It turns out that, before the Brits got there, India had its own education system: a small, informal private school in every village. And students helped to teach each other. But Thomas Macaulay (the famous historian) replaced that system in the mid-nineteenth century with a centralized government system. According to Mahatma Gandhi, in 1931, it reduced the literacy of Indians, because it performed worse than the existing informal system.

Isn't that exactly what is going on in eduation in the United States? We have lordly experts in the progressive educated class imposing their ideas on the practical class and the poor. What kind of education do the folks in the building trade want and need? Or the poor in the inner city? Nobody ever asked. They already knew.

It is time to reform our education and return it to the people. Because we can trust parents to know what is best for their children much more than educated elitists.

As British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury said: Never trust experts.

Private Schools for the Poor

Everyone knows that private schools are for the middle class and the rich. Especially in the Third World. Back in 2000 James Tooley found out that it ain't so. Three years ago he published his research conducted in India, Africa, and China.

In fact there is a thriving private school industry in much of the Third World. Only it operates under the radar--under the radar of government officials and under the radar of international development experts.

Now James Tooley has written a book, The Beautiful Tree: A personal journey into how the world's poor are educating themselves. It presents his research as a personal narrative.

Public education in the Third World is like public education in the developed world. It is a political patronage machine. Unfortunately, for various reasons, the public education teachers and administrators do an even worse job of teaching the poor than they do in the developed world.

But the Third World poor are not just sitting around doing nothing. They have built a private school industry of unregulated schools that outperform the government schools and come close to meeting the rich-kid private schools in performance.

We know that because James Tooley has measured it. He's tested kids in government schools, in unregulated and regulated privates schools, and he's done it in Africa, in India, and in China.

And now he's gotten money from foundations to assist the unregulated private school sector in the Third World. The idea is that education should be run by private entrepreneurs. It's quite a concept.

You see, Tooley has discovered that private, profit-making schools are just what the doctor ordered. The only way the school owner can make money is by giving the customers what they want. Otherwise they'll go to another nearby competitive school. That means that he needs to keep tabs on his teachers and give the parents what they want. What they want is effective, practical education that will help their kids get ahead.

In India, what parents want is "English-medium" schools. That means that the school teaches all subjects in English. Guess what.

In Hyderabad, 88 perent of recognized schools and 80 percent of unrecognized schools reported they were English medium, compared with fewer than 1 percent of government schools.

Why the difference? Well, in India, government schools have to be "mother-tongue," so kids get to be taught in the language of their birth. Sounds like a great idea: multiculturalism, diversity and all that.

Only one problem. Parents don't want mother-tongue schools. They want English-medium schools and they are prepared to pay for it.

[P]oor parents told me that they wanted their children to be proficient in English, which they perceived to be the international language, the language that would help their children get ahead in business and commerce and lift their families out of poverty.

It's quite a concept. Letting parents decide what they want for their children's education. Of course, it would never work here in the United States.

But can the poor afford it? Well, the typical fees charged by these schools are about $2.00 to $3.00 per month. An unskilled job might earn about $50 per month. It's a big expense, but worth it if it takes your family out of the slums.

How Dems Betray their Ideals

You don't often get to ask senior Democrats whether things have got about as far they they can go.

But on Monday, July 6, 2009, Michael Medved got to ask liberal Democrat Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) whether there was a point where government had got too big.

Politicians know how to dodge "when did you stop beating your wife" questions like that, but still, Waxman's answer was telling.

He first said that he believed in free enterprise, that business ought to be as free as possible, subject of course to government regulation. People ought to be free to do what they wanted--particularly in private life.

But some people had it easy, while people without all the assets of intelligence and education had to struggle. Government had a duty to help them. He mentioned treating people with dignity.

So Rep. Waxman was conceding the basic American narrative, but slipping in the need for a safety net to provide dignity for those less fortunate.

The next question could be, well, Congressman, we are spending a trillion dollars on government health care, and 900 billion on government education, and everyone says there's still a problem. So have we got about as far as we can go?

I believe that there is an opening here for conservatives. Waxman is admitting the basic modern moral order, described by Charles Taylor as freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life which dates from the Reformation. But he also wants the lefty addition to that menu, also described by Taylor: equality, dignity, solidarity, and creativity.

Conservatives want to help the less able and the less fortunate. We just don't want to do it by force. We believe in equality, but not equality enforced by government programs and subsidies. We believe in dignity, but we don't believe dignity is created by quotas and by hate speech laws. We believe in solidarity, but not the faux solidarity and astroturf grass-roots conjured up by government-subsidized activist groups like ACORN. We believe in creativity, but not in tenured sinecures at government universities.

This is the ground, I believe, that we should capture in our cultural and political war with our liberal friends. Liberals have great and noble ideas. But they use the wrong means to implement them.

If you try to implement your ideas as government programs you will corrupt yourself and you will fail. Government is force; it is a crude and brutal instrument. If you want to create a society of sweetness and light, of noble souls filled with the spirit of equality, dignity given and received, a brotherly and sisterly solidarity, and curious, talented people, then you've got to put government and political power in the background.

Because as soon as you unleash government power you create inequality. You corrode peoples' dignity. You break up the web of solidarity. And you cramp creativity.

And that is a lesson our liberal friends don't want to learn. Because they've learned to love their power and their influence. And power and influence has become more important to them than equality, dignity, solidarity, and creativity.

Palin: Crazy or Foxlike?

Everyone is shocked by the decision of Sarah Palin to resign as Governor of Alaska. The general consensus seems to be that she is crazy.

There's no doubt that the conventional wisdom is that you need a power base to run for president, and now Palin is throwing away her political power base, the governorship of the state of Alaska.

All this is empty speculation. It assumes that Gov. Palin wants to run for president. It assumes that the governorship is an asset. It assumes that the conventional way of rising through politics is the best way for Palin to rise.

And let us forget the canard that she is a quitter and that she has left the State of Alaska in the lurch. The State of Alaska can do just fine without Palin as governor. Or anyone else as governor.

I'd rather make the following points:

• People tend to overemphasize the importance of the presidency. More important is setting the agenda for national politics. Democrats have been good at this over the past era. Whatever conservatives and Republicans may have wanted, the agenda is usually about the Democratic agenda, increasing the welfare state and government power generally. The big thing for conservatives is not getting a charismatic president. It is changing the agenda.
  
• People tend to talk and write as if they owned their favorite politicians. We don't. Politicians all the time drop out of the limelight and life goes on.
• Politics isn't the only thing. It isn't even the most important thing. The most important thing is raising up our families and getting the children off the nest. If anything, over the last century, politics has been the No. 1 thing making the important things harder for people.
• It may not take a political genius to follow Obama. The recklessness and the blindness of the Obamites is going to provoke a huge backlash. Strictly speaking, Obama has been straight with the American people. He said he would transform healthcare and energy policy and that is what he is doing. But the American people weren't really thinking what that transformation would mean to them. Most people are happy with their health care and opposed to artificial increases in energy prices.
  

Whatever Sarah Palin plans to do, family-wise, politics-wise, all we can do is wish her well. Anything else is just self-indulgence.

Obamacare: Disaster for Who?

On the one hand people argue that President Obama's plan for health care reform is the end of freedom as we know it.

On the other hand others argue that his plan is a bridge too far that will end in failure worse than Hillarycare in 1994.

And they are arguing it in the July 20 National Review now on line.

Mark Steyn is arguing the end-of-freedom line, as the professional pessimist he has become. Call it "Dependence Day," he says, for government health care will transform our culture and our politics forever.

Ramesh Ponnuru is arguing a bitten-off-more-than-they-can-chew line. People love the idea of health reform as long as they come out ahead. Only trouble is that the week-by-week of health care politics this year is demonstrating clearly that a government plan will mean massive tax increases. Or benefit cuts. Or both. Or fiscal meltdown.

But which is it?

I'd say: both and neither.

There is still plenty of scope for politicians to offer free stuff to voters. They will do this up until the moment after the whole government spending thing crashes in ruins.

And it is also true that in places like Europe the people demonstrate an extraordinary docility and appetite for dependency. No doubt there are plenty of people in the United States who would love to live like dependent adolescents.

But then there's the law, proudly called Stein's Law by Herbert Stein. "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."

It often seems in these latter days that liberalism and the continual growth in government spending is unstoppable. But the truth is that the notion of the Medicare unfunded liability as $30 trillion or $50 trillion, or whatever it will be next week means one simple thing. Medicare cannot go on the way it is forever. It will stop.

Viewed strategically, Obamacare is the Democrats' current attempt to lasso the health care problem. But it is probably just another bout of shadow boxing.

Because today health care can go on as it is. For a few years, at least.

That's because of Chantrill's Corollary. If things can go on as they are then they probably won't change.

Or at least the politicians probably won't get to change it. They will be afraid of the opposition.

Eventually the welfare state will end in disaster. That will happen at the point that things just can't go on like they are any more and when people are utterly abandoned to dependency.

It will all be very fascinating for the historians. But not too much fun for the people trying to live through it.

Farewell to All My Greatness

To visit Ashland, Oregon, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is to visit a Petit Trianon of liberalism. It is to experience a perfect stage-set of liberal verities.

Why, the very Playbill to the festival season outlines the liberal program. The Mission Statement talks of "cultural richness" and "our collective humanity." The Values Statement speaks of "Excellence" "Inclusion" "Learning" and "Environmental Responsibility," as well and a "safe and supportive workplace" for the theater company.

As you can imagine, on this stage set there are members of traditionally marginalized groups carefully included in the blocking, even to the extent of a spot of sign language here and there. Everyone included except for you-know-who.

And to top it all, here's Artistic Director Bill Rauch:

Whatever one's political perspective, it's hard to deny that there is new optimism in our country, even in these hard times.

You gotta love these liberals. In fairness, the Playbill must have been written in the fevered transition between a six percent victory and a triumphant inauguration. But you know that the Oregon Shakespeare Festival would never have celebrated the first 100 days of Ronald Reagan in such florid terms.

But to be fair (again, because we are conservatives) the festival recognizes that it has a problem. Right now it's in the middle of an American Revolutions project to commission a cycle of history plays. But project director Alison Carey has a problem.

"You cannot tell the story of the United States without including the story of conservative political and social movements," said Alison Carey [to] the New York Times.

Unfortunately so far she’s come up blank: "I've never had a play come to me that I could say had a conservative perspective," said Ms. Carey at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, adding that if anyone hears of a playwright with one in hand, "send him my way."

Yes, it must be a problem. The liberal moral/cultural community has just spent half a century telling itself that conservatives have nothing to say. So, not surprisingly, no conservative has imagined that anything they say would be welcome in the uber-liberal culture of the theater.

This sort of thing cuts both ways. If liberals have so "excluded" the possibility of a conservative history play at the turn of the 21st century then it also means that they have no clue about how the conservative temperament works and how it could rise and thrive, perhaps beginning in thousands of chaotic Tea Parties and ending up bringing on some new American Revolution.

The danger of a Petit Trianon of liberalism is that one say they will be happily repeating liberal-speak in the liberal court of the ancien regime as one liberal bastion after another disappears in a confusion of smoke and rubble.

And then comes the day when a minor mob storms the empty shell of the Bastille.

Or then comes the day when King Henry VIII has no need of the conniving political skills of his Cardinal Wolsey, and the cardinal is left muttering farewell, a long farewell to all his greatness.

The New Spoils System

Back in the late 19th century, the Progressives, great-grandparents of today's liberals, were all agreed in substituting a civil service system, with promotion examinations, for the evils of the spoils system. They wanted to purge the governmental apparatus of political corruption and favoritism.

That was then. This is now.

In 2009 we have a liberal Supreme Court justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, according to Michael Barone, discussing the blatant manipulation of civil service procedures as just the workings of politics. For Ginsburg it is not outrageous that, in the New Haven firefighter case, city officials pressured the civil service commission to disregard the results of a promotion examination for city firefighters. Comments Barone:

It may remind some of us old enough to remember of the machinations and contrivances of Southern white officials and agitators employed to prevent blacks from registering and voting.

Then there are liberals like Yale Law faculty member Emily Bazelon.

She laments that the promotion test rewarded memorization and that it favored " 'fire buffs' -- guys who read fire suppression manuals on their down time." She is outraged that a fire department might want to promote firefighters who know more about suppressing fires, rescuing victims and protecting their colleagues rather than simply promote a predetermined number of members of specific racial groups whose self-appointed political spokesmen back the politicians in office.

The irony is that the civil service movement of a century ago argued precisely in favor of this kind of professionalization. They insisted on objective criteria for hiring and promotion in government service.

It is indeed astonishing that liberals should have strayed so far from the principles of the clean government Progressives. Except that it is not.

You'd expect that, after a century, a political movement like the Progressive movement would have become corrupted. You would expect that their political activists and office holders would start to believe in themselves rather than their ideas. You would expect that they would start to favor their friends rather than their principles.

But is still shocking to see law professors and Supreme Court justices descending to their level.

That's the way a proud political movement loses its moral authority. Every political movement has plenty of bad apples and corner cutters. But things really start to go bad when the good people give in to the temptations of power and condone the cheap betrayals of once noble principles.

Still, it's good to see that the Supreme Court still believes, 5-4, in equal justice under law, and that it has ruled in favor of the firefighters.

But it's only 5-4. The Supreme Court is one vote away from an endorsement of a racial spoils system.