Mitch “The Other Mitch” Pearlstein spells out the case for vouchers in the Strib today.

He starts in with all that common sense:

A common myth is that schools across the country with lots of low-income students are less-well-funded than schools with fewer low-income students. The opposite, actually, is more routinely the case. Minnesota, in fact, recently ranked fifth best in the nation in terms of “extra poverty-based funding per student living below the poverty line.” This (benevolent) gap was $3,075.

But given that African-Americans in Minneapolis are doing unusually poorly academically, how do these conflicting findings compute?

To complicate matters even more, consider Ascension School, a K-8 Catholic school in north Minneapolis. Students are overwhelmingly minority; they’re overwhelmingly non-Catholic; and in 2005, 90 percent of eighth-graders there passed Minnesota’s Basic Skills test in math and 95 percent passed Minnesota’s Basic Skills test in reading.

In contrast, eighth-graders in Minneapolis public schools, in 2003, passed at these rates in math: 82 percent for whites; 57 percent for Asian/ Pacific Islanders; 41 percent for Hispanics; 40 percent for American Indians; and 28 percent for blacks. Please note, though you probably already have, that the 82 percent passing rate for whites in Minneapolis public schools was substantially below Ascension’s 90 percent for all its kids. MPS scores were significantly better in reading than they were in math; but again, they were significantly below Ascension’s reading scores.

What are tuition rates (for non-parishioners) in inner-city Catholic schools in the state? According to the Minnesota Catholic Conference, they average under $3,200 for elementary schools and under $8,000 for high schools. By contrast, as long ago as 2003 — in the wake of a recession — federal, state, and local revenues in Minneapolis Public Schools totaled $13,658 per “pupil unit.”

Pearlstein notes that, given the objective data (and data he didn’t state – such as the fact that private, Catholic and alternative schools do a vastly better job with most “special ed” students), the case for vouchers should be open and shut.

Of course, it’s not about rational evidence.  It’s been said that the greatest victory of the compulsory education system has been convincing people that there’s no other way to educate kids; similarly, the greatest victory of the current school system has  been getting people to think that what we have today:

• is, when everything is working, good for our kids
• can be made to work
• That the system “working”, even as intended, can be a good thing.  I’m reminded of the teacher I had, who declared “communism in its ideal form would be cool; it’s just not practiced properly anywhere”.  The current school system has turned into the same thing.

The fact is, the school system will not change as long as enough voters believe the three bullets above.  The teacher’s union and the academic-industrial complex is too firmly entrenched to allow any significant changes, and too many voters believe the three points above to make any meaningful change.
And the only change that will come is when parents seize the power and control back from the teachers, the unions, the administrations and the educational academics.  It’s happening, of course – minority parents are leading the efflux from the inner-city schools.

Which, of course, will only exacerbate the “problems” (I prefer to call them “terminal diseases”) in the public system, as the parents with what P.J. O’Rourke called the “infinite common sense to give a sh*t” leave the system, taking their interest, their commitment and their kids with them.

If vouchers – or any other kind of school choice – ever happen, it’ll be after everyone that could benefit from them has already left the system.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Thursday, January 18th, 2007 at 7:12 am and is filed under Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.