Friday, August 28, 2009

Democrats for Public Healthcare Oppose School Choice

Democrats for government healthcare – the public option – oppose school choice.

Our publicly funded education option is not working well. A realistic assessment of it would declare it a failure. Evidence of failure is objective and unequivocal: over half our high school graduates require remedial courses in math and English when they go on to college. And the percentage of graduates without satisfactory math and English skills that don’t go to college is probably in the range of eighty to ninety percent.

Taxpayers are given bitter choices to educate their children. They can send them to public schools, accepting inadequate education outcomes. They can move into expensive housing areas which have high-performing public schools. Or they can scrape and save to send their children to private schools. No matter the choice, the taxpayer funded education monopoly produces an unsatisfactory product.

The Liberals who preach that a government funded healthcare system will drive down costs through competition want nothing to do with competition from private schools. The Liberals say such competition would take money out of the public schools system, making even worse. Yet our public education costs are very high, and unlike our expensive private healthcare system, our public education system is failing us at the worse time, when education weaknesses threaten our global competitiveness.

At least our healthcare system is the most responsive to patient need in the world – as measured by the World Health Organization – and produces bestter outcomes for treating serious health problems.

Our education system is among the worst.

The former premier of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, once said that capitalists would sell the Soviets the rope to hang us.

That’s not true. We’re hanging ourselves.

No comments: