No, we are not going to fix the public schools

Nothing will ever overcome their perverse reverse incentives

And you thought they were teaching reading & math …

Recently I read this brief article, which discusses how our public schools have become overrun with mental-health staff:

In this case, doing nothing is better than doing something

It seems that public-school administrators filled our public schools with amateur therapists who are seeking to justify their continued employment, and now we’re experiencing a sharp rise in student mental health problems. My, my. How strange. Who could’ve seen that coming?

This sort of thing is not an anomaly; it is a consequence of our shoveling money into a system that suffers no consequences for its ongoing failures and its ever-rising prices. In such a system there is only one goal: expansion. With expansion comes more opportunity for people within the system:

• to lobby for ever-increasing pay and ever-decreasing workloads,

• to add new job definitions for their friends and relatives,

• to add more initiatives requiring yet more staff,

  • thereby creating more administrative jobs,

  • and just plain more and more of everything except quality.

The schools are only just getting started on their new-initiatives overreach. Recently districts nationwide have been adopting what they call the Community Schools Model. Search on that term and you’ll find pages of government and teacher-union web sites extolling it.

The Community Schools Model is a Trojan Horse, a foot in the door to unlimited expansion of public schools into other sectors of our economy, including food service, day care, therapy, and medical services. It is also a tool for the nearly total removal of children from their parents’ supervision. It’s a socialist’s wet dream come true.

The misguided origins of American public schools

Let’s clear up some misconceptions:

• Karl Marx did not invent communism,

• Horace Mann did not invent the public schools,

• and what we now call the United States was not settled by free-market capitalists.

Our earliest settlers came here to create Utopian communistic theocratic dictatorships. Driven by religious fervor and led by divinely-inspired missionaries, our predecessors were possessed by notions of establishing perfect societies on Earth, mimicking the one they believed to be in Heaven. Many (if not most) colonists imagined that there would be no need for the conventions of the Old World whose satanic influences they were escaping; hence in their perfect New World there would be no need for private property, money, laws, etc. A perfectly Christian community, they believed, would run entirely on the selfless commitment of parishioners to their churches.

One of the longest-lived and most recent American experiments in communist theocracy was a collection of Iowa towns called the Amana Colonies, which operated from the 1850s to the 1930s. Today they are a tourist attraction. You should make a point of visiting them and taking whatever guided tours are available; it will be a revelation to you. Whether you visit or not, you should obtain a copy of A Change and A Parting: My Story of Amana, which “traces the history of the Amana Colonies through the eyes of the author, who was among the last group of young people to reach adulthood in one of the seven villages ruled by the elders of the religious sect, The Community of True Inspiration”. It remains one of the most fascinating reads of my life.

Our earliest settlers learned the truth about communism the hard way: about half of them died from it. Read:

A Lesson in Communism from our Two Earliest Colonies

By the mid-1600s, settlers were figuring out that communism wasn’t a viable philosophy for basic survival, but their penchant for socialist education remained unabated. In the 1640s, church leaders began passing laws requiring communities above a certain size to establish schools and to require attendance. The public schools of that time were extensions of the churches; it was implicitly understood that public education was firmly under the control of local pastors and always would be.

From their inception, public schools have intentionally been instruments of ideological indoctrination by whoever controlled them. As long as the population consisted of the first generation of religious idealists who had emigrated expressly to freely practice their uniform ideologies, this worked out fine. But as the population diversified, beliefs about what should be taught also diversified. The intent of the naïve people who created the schools was to forever promulgate their own beliefs, but what they actually accomplished was to create a centralized instrument for the indoctrination of children by whoever would ultimately gain control over public-school funding. They could never have imagined the distant, centralized financing of today’s public schools by state and federal governments that didn’t even exist at the time.

The uncontrolled tyranny of third parties

One of the weaknesses of a socialist provider is the lack of control over third parties who profit from sabotaging the system. Any industry that has inserted itself into a socialist service provider can create an entire world of dogmatic industry practices designed to benefit itself, to the detriment of the system’s customers.

Nothing illustrates this better than K-12 curriculum publishers. I’ve written an entire web site dedicated to the destruction of public-school reading instruction by rogue publishers:

My Child Will Read

so I’ll refrain from repeating most of that here. Instead I’ll summarize how our feedback-free public schools have been continually sabotaged:

• public school administrators have a revolving door with curriculum publishers;
  

• curriculum publishers don't make money selling proven curricula that schools would prefer to never replace;
  

• rather, publishers make money churning the schools through one ridiculous fad after another,
  

• which is why they're also in bed with quack university professors who are always coming up with yet more educational snake oil,
  

• and why publishers finance the campaigns of ideologically radical politicians who demand revolutions in public school curricula as often as possible.

Our curriculum publishers have created an endless cycle of educational faddism. There is no stopping it. Unlike parents, whose children suffer from this corruption and who cannot afford to fight this catastrophe, curriculum publishers work full-time on undermining us with their relentless churning of insane educational innovations.

Parents will never control the schools

Recently a lot of conservatives are patting themselves on the back for having elected their own candidates onto school boards. Examples:

• Moms for America Applaud Big Wins in Florida School Board Seats
  

• Candidates Backed by Parental Rights Group Win 90 School Board Seats in Year’s Elections

Kudos to these tireless advocates of school sanity, but sadly their victories are all for naught. They don’t know what they’re up against. Bending their local school boards to their will is like trying to make rivers flow uphill;  they’ll exhaust themselves failing.

Parents create ragtag groups of volunteers to fight against a $700-billion-per-year behemoth that is fully integrated into their federal, state, and local governments. The behemoth has armies of full-time staff whose purpose, all day every day, is to defeat them. The system is vicious and self-serving beyond imagination. It will swat them like gnats.

I know about this personally because I was part of the first online group of parent warriors who tried to reform the public schools back in the 1990s. We created a "parents' union" of sorts in order to take on the educational establishment. In Illinois we called ourselves the "Illinois Loop" and got our own domain. Our group contained both concerned parents (like me) and educational professionals who didn't buy into the prevailing educational ideology. We struggled for about seven years butting heads with the system before giving up. The press called this "The Reading Wars". We fought with all the energy we had, but we didn't win. Unionized paid professionals with billions of dollars behind them, it turns out, can beat a ragtag group of objecting parents and dissident educators.

You might imagine that you have the right to control “your” schools because you believe that you are their primary funding source. If so, you are confused. Most of the money your school district receives doesn’t even come from district parents; the main sources are:

• shareholders of corporations that aren’t in your district (via state & federal corporate taxes),
  

• individuals who aren’t in your district (via state & federal personal taxes),
  

• corporations and childless property owners within your district,
  

• and local childless renters who rent from property owners (and who therefore pay property taxes indirectly without even realizing it).

Here for example is the breakdown of California K-12 funding sources:

So the small “Local Property Tax” slice mostly doesn’t come from district parents, and even the little money that a school district receives from local parents is unconditional and therefore exerts no influence on school policy. In the world of school district funding, parents simply don’t matter.

The insanity of school funding propaganda

Imagine the CEO of Walmart holding a press conference where he congratulates himself for raising prices. Absurd, you say? Well then, what do you think about politicians who do essentially that same thing:

• Legislature increases support for public schools
  

• State House Democrats call for $15,000 raise for every teacher in Texas
  

• Dems attempt to push through school funding, wage increase
  

• Pennsylvania needs to spend $5.4B to close gap between rich and poor schools, Dem report says
  

• Proposed Colorado budget would fully fund K-12 schools for first time since Great Recession
  

• As long school funding lawsuit ends in Kansas, some fear lawmakers will backslide on education goals
  

• Iowa increases public school funding, some say it’s not enough

This list could go on and on. Note that the insanity is bi-partisan. I once had a deeply conservative Illinois state senator (of my district), who despite his general common sense would come back from legislative sessions at the capitol bragging about how he’d “brought home the bacon” for our local public schools, meaning that he’d voted to increase the state’s share of public-school funding. Apparently neither he nor his constituents grasped that he’d basically voted for an unconditional price increase and a disconnection of school policy from local parents.

Politicians congratulate themselves on how much money they’ve pumped in to the public schools; this is often a centerpiece of their campaigns. The absurdity seems lost on almost everyone:

• Spending more does not ensure improved results; in fact in public education the opposite has consistently held true for decades – we have more than doubled our inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending since 1970, with nothing to show for it.
  

• In the absence of improvement, spending more is detrimental to everyone.
  

• More spending is typically an open door to graft, third-party corruption, and other inefficiencies.
  

• With no competitive basis for comparison, public school efficiency is never even discussed, because there is no obvious way to compare it to anything.

The American sheeple are endlessly snookered by this perverse terminology. The power of this nonsense seems to cross all political boundaries; “conservatives” seem almost as apt as everyone else to buy into it. Remember: Increased School Funding is just a deceptive name for a Price Increase.

The real solution

Let’s start by cleaning up our terminology. Let’s stop calling them public schools and start calling them what they really are: government schools. They are owned and operated by the government. They are, by definition, socialist.

Competition-free, socialist government schools have reverse, perverse incentives, and so they become playgrounds for charlatans - especially politicians pretending to be helpful - folks who measure success by how much of your money they're shoveling into their system. Consider the contrast:

• In the private sector:
  

  • persistent failure is discouraged via de-funding caused by departing customers;
    

  • CEOs who want to keep their jobs tend to extol increased efficiency that leads to price reductions.
    

• In the government schools:
  

  • persistent failure is rewarded; captive taxpayers are chastised for not spending enough, and are thereby shamed into voting to increase their own taxes;
    

  • politicians who want to get reelected must extol public school price increases.

Under our school system, even the taxpayers have reverse incentives; subsidized parents are brainwashed to believe that more money equals better education, so they vote to increase the tax burden on everyone, thereby increasing their net subsidy despite their own higher tax payments. Of course when their subsidy disappears (i.e. when their kids leave school) they flee to lower-school-tax areas, leaving their former jurisdictions to collapse under the burden they voted for.

We "conservatives" must wake up and realize that the root of government school failure is its socialist funding model, and consequently that the government schools cannot be fixed, no matter how hard we try, because socialism cannot be fixed, no matter how hard we try. We might as well seek to make water run uphill. We can never fix a system where the entire staff and all the system’s vendors are incentivized to both fail and raise their prices.

Fighting government schools is an uphill battle where the hill keeps getting steeper and the hill never ends. The schools rely on a never-ending stream of naïve parents entering the system, as older, wiser, exhausted parents are exiting. For all practical purposes, the system has unlimited staff and money, while the very few “aware” parents have limited time and funds. School administrators know you’ll eventually give up and go away; their strategy is to ignore you, humor you, and exhaust you until you disappear.

So how do you win?

First, detach yourself from whatever positive memories you may have of your own government-school experience. During the 20^th century, our biggest issue was the schools’ uses of ineffective curricula. Today we’re in a completely different world. Your local government school almost certainly has no qualms with letting boys shower naked with your daughters, or with removing your kids from your custody for failing to “transgender” them. Could you even have imagined such things just a few years ago? What do you suppose government schools will be advocating five years from now? The insanity is coming at us faster than we can imagine it.

You cannot win this war by playing the government’s game by the government’s rules on the government’s turf. Our only path is to bypass the government’s socialist system entirely by creating our own completely independent systems. You cannot reform the government schools. The only thing you can do is vacate them. Here’s a site that could help you do that: Public School Exit.

The way to deal with our current system is to abandon it. Dedicate your efforts to getting your kids out. The beauty is this: regardless of what happens to the schools, you will have saved your own children. You don’t need to win an election or convince your neighbors or ask anyone’s permission or worry about what the schools are teaching your kids today.

You’ve always had school choice. Use it.

==== ADDENDUM OF 2/17/2025

Nothing illustrates the problem with socialist systems better than the government (“public”) schools. In a market-based system, your solution to your dissatisfaction with a vendor is:

• Find a competitor

• take your money with you

• and see if the competitor can do better.

In a socialist system, where you cannot take your money with you, your “solution” looks more like this:

• Complain to the government board.

• When that fails, find like-minded neighbors and get them to join you in complaining to the government board.

• When that fails, try one of these:

  • upend your entire life to run a political campaign to install yourself on the board, or

  • boycott the government service, find an alternative for which you must pay, and continue to pay (via taxes) for the government service, or more likely

  • simply give up.

Here’s how complaining to the government board is likely to work out for you:

• School Board Walks Out on Parents Angry Over ‘Rainbow Parade’ Book for Kindergarteners
  

• Florida school board removes parent from meeting for reading out of sexually explicit book from HS library
  

• Georgia parent reading sexual content from library at school board meeting is cut off: 'Inappropriate'
  

• Man forcibly removed from school board meeting by security while reading from LGBTQ book: 'Unconstitutional'
  

• Twisted measure to silence voices of dissent at school board meetings — arrest them

If all else fails, you might try having your kids do the complaining for you; perhaps the board will have second thoughts about stifling, removing, or arresting him:

• 11-year-old reads aloud from ‘pornographic’ book he checked out from library at school board meeting

So, you see, this is how socialism in general (and government schools in particular) “work”. Things must get so bad that groups of angry customers storm monopoly providers’ board meetings and publicly explain board members’ obvious and outrageous indiscretions to their faces. If customers get explicit enough, say by reading aloud the actual pornography in their kids’ school libraries, they get shut down and possibly removed or even arrested.

Even stranger, the sheeple living under such systems seem to suffer from some sort of Stockholm syndrome in which they actively resist any changes. I cannot remember ever hearing of any serious politician running on a platform involving the total replacement of the government schools. Can you?