Public Schools: Eating Your Own Cooking
It’s no secret that many public schools at the elementary and secondary levels are underperforming. Overcrowded classrooms, out-dated textbooks, bureaucratic red tape, rising violence: there are many reasons why the system isn’t working. And every few years (conveniently around election time), politicians start throwing about detailed plans and sound bites about how they will do better. After the polls close of course, it’s back to business as usual. Business as usual often means everything but education. But here’s a novel thought: what if all elected officials had to send their children to public schools? Shocking, I know. How crazy I must be to think that local, state, and Federal politicians should eat their own cooking.

All Politicians Should Be Held Accountable to Our Public School System
From liberals like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to conservatives like George H.W. Bush and John McCain, our political landscape is full of people who talk the talk but don’t walk the walk. They oversee budgets, funding, and legislation, but they don’t deem public schools suitable for their own children…just yours. That Jimmy Carter was one of the few national politicians to send his kid to public school in recent memory is emblematic of this problem. Although not a soothsayer, I’m reasonably confident that if more politicians took this approach, you’d see a rapid improvement in the nation’s secondary education system.

Paying for Public Schools. How about a Holiday from Iraq & Corporate Greed?
Whenever there is any discussion about better funding for public schools, the same argument gets tossed out there: “how are you going to pay for all of this?” Well how about a month-long break from the Iraq War? At a cost of nearly $600 billion since the war began (or $10 billion a month), an Iraq War vacation could do the trick. Or how about that $700 billion bailout for Wall Street? Just think about how many computers, teachers, and schools we could have funded if the government had provided more oversight of the markets.

Many would agree that the United States is blessed with one of the strongest higher education systems in the world. With award-winning colleges and universities from coast to coast, we have little difficulty leading in innovation, patents, and research. But with better funding at the source (i.e. kindergarten, elementary, and secondary schools), we could potentially solidify our dominance in global education. To make this happen, of course, requires that we convince our politicians to swallow the same food they expect us to eat. I’ll start holding my breath…1…2…3….