By Matthew Ricchiazzi:
There is not even a single school board candidate that supports dissolving district schools, which disappoints me. When it comes to the decentralization of decision making, even Carl Paladino is only willing to go so far as a return to neighborhood schools.
Once in a while you come across a book that ruptures the dominant narrative of a body politic, that it causes you to reshape your assessment of something. Government Schools are Bad for Your Kids, by James Ostrowski, is an unapologetic indictment of the contemporary American education system. It’s about 20 years ahead of its time, but shouldn’t be; its insights and conclusion will seem both obvious and inevitable in retrospect.
In 2009, I was someone who believed that better management alone would be enough to improve the school system. I was impressed with what Mayor Bloomberg had done in New York, wrestling Mayoral control from the School Board and competently managing a mammoth system. I had even – naïvely – suggested that Buffalo should consider Mayoral control of its schools too; something that I now realize was wildly foolish and would be disastrous given the caliber of our political leadership.
Ostrowski, a prominent Libertarian, trial attorney, and author of a number of political texts, notes that the system was born at the confluence of Marxist ideology and a Protestant desire to assimilate ethnic minorities by undermining Catholics’ ability to educate their own children independent of the state. Catholics, of course, stubbornly retained their own school system; in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 US 510 (1925) the Supreme Court held that parents have the right to send their kids to private schools. How horrific to imagine that that right was even in question.
But it’s not mainly a text about history; it’s a broad ranging critique. He argues that crime, delinquency, and chronic truancy in government schools is because of bad management inherent to government entities. Excessive federalization and centralization of the education system stifles creativity and dissent, which has national implications.
Government Schools are Bad for Your Kids
By James Ostrowski
Preface
This book was many years in the making but its impetus was the closing of my kids’ private school in 2006 – St. Rose of Lima elementary school in North Buffalo. It made me angry that a good school was forced to close because the working class parents who constituted most of its customers could no longer afford to pay twice, first for the government schools they didn’t use and once again for the private school tuition for St. Rose.
At the same time, I was in the midst of an effort to reverse 45 straight years of decline in Western New York through a non-profit group known as Free New York. After about two years of effort, I grew frustrated at the slow pace of change. I had written my first book about Buffalo politics and the structural reasons why it would be difficult to turn things around, so it wasn’t that I had reason to be surprised. Yet, the experience was still quite frustrating.
I am not one to quit so I wondered if there was another way. Changing government policy directly was next to impossible. Perhaps the answer was not persuading the government to change but making changes by direct citizen action. Direct citizen action is at the heart of this book.
If you are a parent of government school students or even a teacher or principal, please don’t take this book personally. You didn’t create the system. It was here before your parents were born. Good people cannot do a good job in a bad system. You know that better than I do.
All I ask is that you read the book in its entirety before you make a judgment. Emerson wrote:
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said today.”
Emerson wasn’t saying that we shouldn’t be logical. He was saying that we shouldn’t cling to our past beliefs if new and better evidence is presented to us that challenges those beliefs. Remember those nasty soldiers in the Wizard of Oz who guarded the Wicked Witch of the West? We all thought they’d be angry that Dorothy killed the Witch. They surprised us, however, when they expressed joy at her demise. They too were captives of an evil system.
I have no doubt that this book will be greeted by many government school teachers and administrators in a similar manner. Who knows better how rotten the system is than those who work in it? I also have no doubt that many of those teachers and principals have wanted to break free of the bureaucratic straightjacket and start their own schools. There will be a need for those new schools if this book is half as successful as I believe it will be.
I will admit there was a time when government schools worked better. Not as well as private schools, but better than now. Those days are gone. Federal and state bureaucrats and teachers unions, not parents and local school boards, call the shots now. There was a time when government schools focused more on learning and less on social engineering. But this book is not mainly about what went wrong with government schools. Whatever that is, went wrong many decades ago, hasn’t been fixed and isn’t likely to be fixed soon.
It is time to pull the plug on this failed 150 year old experiment and move on.
It’s a quick read, and worth it. You can get a copy from Amazon: