The Cato Institute’s Neal McCluskey has had enough of politicians telling parents to read to their children. No, he’s not against reading.
“Consider the gall: Public-schooling defenders insist that parents pay for public schools, largely on the grounds that parents can’t handle education themselves. Then they spin right around to blame parents when the schooling is a dud!”
In other words, parents are welcome to “participate” in their children’s education–as long as they support the administration and teachers union and don’t ask any questions–especially “Can we take our money elsewhere?”
From the Cato Institute:
The people who work in and run our district school systems are just like you and me. They are guided to a great extent by their own and their families’ interests. If they think charter schools are better, and will lure away many of their prospective students, they fear that their own jobs will be put in jeopardy. So they work to protect those jobs by making it more difficult for their students to find out about the charter school alternative.
The commentary stems from the case of school district officials in South Carolina refusing charter school officials to have access to their students. One wonders if the same thing might happen in Kansas should charter schools actually gain the ability to become independent entities rather than captive programs of school districts.
