harmonicminer

Glenn Reynolds: Higher education’s bubble is about to burst

It’s a story of an industry that may sound familiar.

The buyers think what they’re buying will appreciate in value, making them rich in the future. The product grows more and more elaborate, and more and more expensive, but the expense is offset by cheap credit provided by sellers eager to encourage buyers to buy.

Buyers see that everyone else is taking on mounds of debt, and so are more comfortable when they do so themselves; besides, for a generation, the value of what they’re buying has gone up steadily. What could go wrong? Everything continues smoothly until, at some point, it doesn’t.

Yes, this sounds like the housing bubble, but I’m afraid it’s also sounding a lot like a still-inflating higher education bubble. And despite (or because of) the fact that my day job involves higher education, I think it’s better for us to face up to what’s going on before the bubble bursts messily.

College has gotten a lot more expensive. A recent Money magazine report notes: “After adjusting for financial aid, the amount families pay for college has skyrocketed 439 percent since 1982. … Normal supply and demand can’t begin to explain cost increases of this magnitude.”

Consumers would balk, except for two things.

First — as with the housing bubble — cheap and readily available credit has let people borrow to finance education. They’re willing to do so because of (1) consumer ignorance, as students (and, often, their parents) don’t fully grasp just how harsh the impact of student loan payments will be after graduation; and (2) a belief that, whatever the cost, a college education is a necessary ticket to future prosperity.

Bubbles burst when there are no longer enough excessively optimistic and ignorant folks to fuel them. And there are signs that this is beginning to happen already.

A New York Times profile last week described Courtney Munna, a 26-year-old graduate of New York University with nearly $100,000 in student loan debt — debt that her degree in Religious and Women’s Studies did not equip her to repay. Payments on the debt are about $700 per month, equivalent to a respectable house payment, and a major bite on her monthly income of $2,300 as a photographer’s assistant earning an hourly wage.

And, unlike a bad mortgage on an underwater house, Munna can’t simply walk away from her student loans, which cannot be expunged in a bankruptcy. She’s stuck in a financial trap.

Some might say that she deserves it — who borrows $100,000 to finance a degree in women’s and religious studies that won’t make you any money? She should have wised up, and others should learn from her mistake, instead of learning too late, as she did: “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life slaving away to pay for an education I got for four years and would happily give back.”

But bubbles burst when people catch on, and there’s some evidence that people are beginning to catch on. Student loan demand, according to a recent report in the Washington Post, is going soft, and students are expressing a willingness to go to a cheaper school rather than run up debt. Things haven’t collapsed yet, but they’re looking shakier — kind of like the housing market looked in 2007.

So what happens if the bubble collapses? Will it be a tragedy, with millions of Americans losing their path to higher-paying jobs?

Maybe not. College is often described as a path to prosperity, but is it? A college education can help people make more money in three different ways.

First, it may actually make them more economically productive by teaching them skills valued in the workplace: Computer programming, nursing or engineering, say. (Religious and women’s studies, not so much.)

Second, it may provide a credential that employers want, not because it represents actual skills, but because it’s a weeding tool that doesn’t produce civil-rights suits as, say, IQ tests might. A four-year college degree, even if its holder acquired no actual skills, at least indicates some ability to show up on time and perform as instructed.

And, third, a college degree — at least an elite one — may hook its holder up with a useful social network that can provide jobs and opportunities in the future. (This is more true if it’s a degree from Yale than if it’s one from Eastern Kentucky, but it’s true everywhere to some degree).

While an individual might rationally pursue all three of these, only the first one — actual added skills — produces a net benefit for society. The other two are just distributional — about who gets the goodies, not about making more of them.

Yet today’s college education system seems to be in the business of selling parts two and three to a much greater degree than part one, along with selling the even-harder-to-quantify “college experience,” which as often as not boils down to four (or more) years of partying.

Post-bubble, perhaps students — and employers, not to mention parents and lenders — will focus instead on education that fosters economic value. And that is likely to press colleges to focus more on providing useful majors. (That doesn’t necessarily rule out traditional liberal-arts majors, so long as they are rigorous and require a real general education, rather than trendy and easy subjects, but the key word here is “rigorous.”)

My question is whether traditional academic institutions will be able to keep up with the times, or whether — as Anya Kamenetz suggests in her new book, “DIY U” — the real pioneering will be in online education and the work of “edupunks” who are more interested in finding new ways of teaching and learning than in protecting existing interests.

I’m betting on the latter. Industries seldom reform themselves, and real competition usually comes from the outside. Keep your eyes open — and, if you’re planning on applying to college, watch out for those student loans.

As slick spreads, so does frustration

The White House is being pounded for not acting more aggressively in the month-old oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. The administration is hitting back, mostly at BP. Louisiana is threatening to take matters into its own hands. The truth is, the government has little direct experience at either the national or state level at stopping deepwater oil leaks — and few realistic options.

“As the administration is being pounded,” eh? This is “pounding?” I invite the writer of this particular opinion piece to go back and review the press coverage of Katrina. Now, that was an administration getting pounded.

With the oil flowing and spreading at a furious rate, President Barack Obama has accused BP of a “breakdown of responsibility.” He named a special independent commission to review what happened.

But the administration seems to want to have it both ways — insisting it’s in charge while also insisting that BP do the heavy lifting. The White House is arguing that government officials aren’t just watching from the sidelines, but also acknowledging there’s just so much the government can do directly.

The problem here is that the administration is having a hard time being seen as doing something. 

When somebody didn’t have health coverage at a price they were willing to pay, the government could DO something.  What it did is incomprehensible, incoherent, and incompetent…  but it’s going to be a few years before the degree to which this is true is manifestly undeniable, so, for now, some people give the feds credit for at least having done something….  though the numbers of such people appear to be dropping daily.

Is somebody out of work?  Hey, the government is spending billions and billions and billions on makework projects (did you know you can create a $50,000 per year job for only half-a-million bucks of federal money?), unemployment benefit extensions, and shovel ready projects of all kinds (I have dogs…  so I have a few shovel ready projects I wouldn’t mind federal funding for…  and they’d do about as much good for the economy).

Are some children mentally disabled?  Let’s create a federal law that imposes on the states an enormous bureacracy whose net effect is to send an army of expensively educated people with Master’s degrees to work in small classes (or even private lessons!) trying to teach 3rd grade arithmetic to 15 yr olds who have no chance of ever remembering a significant amount of the instruction, let alone using it for anything.  Let’s make federal laws that force states to create educational policy by lawsuit, so that one parent sues under new federal law, and the entire state’s approach changes, very expensively, as a result.  And let’s remember to reserve names like “mean-spirited” and “cold-hearted” for anyone who thinks perhaps this isn’t a wise use of public resources.  In the meantime, let’s continue to complain about how financially strapped the state and county education establishments are.

At least we’re trying to do something.

So, just to get in the spirit of things, tomorrow (or the next day), I’ll be posting some suggestions for things the Obama Administration could do immediately to stop the Gulf oil leak.  Not that I’m promising any of them will actually work.  But one of them might….  and we have to try, don’t we?

This is a crosspost with MusicalGod.

They Spend WHAT? The Real Cost of Public Schools

Although public schools are usually the biggest item in state and local budgets, spending figures provided by public school officials and reported in the media often leave out major costs of education and thus understate what is actually spent.

To document the phenomenon, this paper reviews district budgets and state records for the nation’s five largest metro areas and the District of Columbia. It reveals that, on average, per-pupil spending in these areas is 44 percent higher than officially reported.

Real spending per pupil ranges from a low of nearly $12,000 in the Phoenix area schools to a high of nearly $27,000 in the New York metro area. The gap between real and reported per-pupil spending ranges from a low of 23 percent in the Chicago area to a high of 90 percent in the Los Angeles metro region.

To put public school spending in perspective, we compare it to estimated total expenditures in local private schools. We find that, in the areas studied, public schools are spending 93 percent more than the estimated median private school.

Citizens drastically underestimate current per-student spending and are misled by official figures. Taxpayers cannot make informed decisions about public school funding unless they know how much districts currently spend. And with state budgets stretched thin, it is more crucial than ever to carefully allocate every tax dollar

At the link above, the article introduced here is available (scroll down on the page to see it).   If you care about how your tax dollars for education are being spent, it’s required reading.

The problem with public education is NOT too little money allocated for it.

Hmmm…

The High Cost of College and What it Does to Your Children

Each fall, nearly two million American students will leave for college for the very first time. Their education will cost $12,000 a year for a public university and up to $50,000 for a private one. Scholarships and grants reduce the cost for most families, but still, the Wall Street Journal reports that the average student leaves college with $23,186 in debt.

Nationwide, the total cost for this transaction is somewhere between 25 and 40 billion dollars per year.

At least families are getting their money’s worth.

Or not.

A recent study confirms what many parents have long suspected: going to college can make kids forget what’s important and embrace values that are counter to what they learned growing up.

Before I share this study’s results, let me say this to parents: leftist professors don’t feel sorry for you. As far as they’re concerned, you’ve been oppressing the masses to get that money anyway, so it’s deliciously ironic that you not only turn your children over to the indoctrinators, but that you fork over 50k to 200k and for the privilege of doing so.

Don’t take my word for it. Here’s what the late Richard Rorty, one of the most prominent philosophers of the 20th century, said on the subject:

“I, like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities … try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own … The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think that the entire ‘American liberal establishment’ is engaged in a conspiracy. The parents have a point … [W]e are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours … I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft [domination] of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents …”[1] [editor’s note: sorry for all the ellipses, but it’s hard to summarize Rorty’s windblown rhetoric].

When it comes to reshaping values, liberal universities know precisely what they’re doing. And the reality is that about four out of five students walk away from their Christian faith by the time they are in their twenties.[2]

The Indoctrination Plan:

What your child won’t learn at college: a sense of citizenship. In February, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute released its annual report entitled, “The Shaping of the American Mind.” ISI researchers studied students’ knowledge of basic citizenship questions, along with 39 issue-based propositions and found that college graduates are dangerously ignorant of basic civics.

For example, fewer than one in two college graduates know that the phrase “We hold these truths to be self evident…” is from the Declaration of Independence (10% actually think it is from the Communist Manifesto).

What your child will learn at college: liberal radicalism. According to ISI, college graduates are significantly MORE likely to believe in abortion on demand and same sex marriage, and significantly LESS likely to believe that the Bible is the word of God, that prayer should be allowed in schools, and that anyone can succeed in America with hard work and perseverance.

Here is a great article on the differences between public school and home school when it comes to teaching history… and other things.

The article makes several valid points, and I encourage you to read it.

Parents aren’t specialists in the areas that high school teachers are, and so theoretically they can’t teach as well, according to critics of home schooling. The article points out that frequently the teachers of many subjects aren’t specialists, but are simply moved into a particular course because of the needs of the school, regardless of their own preparation. And I know that does happen, because I’ve seen it and experienced it myself.

But, bluntly, the fact is that too many teachers can’t teach effectively in the area that is their purported specialty.  And their school systems usually can’t get rid of them, even if they want to.  The only way to fire a teacher, short of criminal acts on the part of the teacher, seems to be when the state is broke, and can claim “financial exigencies.”

I have known some great public school teachers.  I know some now.  But I’ve also known some pretty bad ones.  They are all still teaching, as far as I know.

Public school has become a giant political correctness factory in too many places.  It virtually always indoctrinates in a left-leaning direction, sometimes radically so.  If your child is assigned to an incompetent teacher, or simply a doctrinaire leftist one, there is not much you can do about it, all too often.  I’ve tried.  And failed.

Some of our kids have had some decent teachers in the public schools.  But they are swimming against the tide, and there is no way for even a competent teacher to avoid the political correctness that masquerades as “critical thinking” in the schools.

And there is no way for even a good teacher to do much about all the social/political nonsense and experimentation that goes on in the schools today, that wouldn’t have been tolerated 30 years ago, because much of it is mandated by the state.

That’s why we are a home-schooling family.

The other kind of IED (intermittent explosive disorder)
Much more at the link.

The New York Times says that a faculty member at the University of Alabama killed 3 and wounded 6 others after being denied tenure at the biology department. Circumstantial evidence suggested that she was upset at what she believed was unfair treatment. The suspect apparently “had told acquaintances recently that she was worried about getting tenure”, and the NYT quoted one source as saying “she began to talk about her problems getting tenure in a very forceful and animated way, saying it was unfair.”

I’ve been to some tense faculty meetings. Meetings with outcomes that had the potential to really change people’s lives who were involved, in one way or another.

So far I haven’t had to duck and cover because somebody started shooting.  But it is starting to seem that the only people who respect the “gun-free zones” on campus are the victims.

Maybe I should start ordering my hoodies to be Kevlar-lined.

Just in case a deranged post-modern prof who gives feminist readings to medieval French poetry happens to go postal.

Virginia Tech is strongly committed to diversity.   It is not “academics honoring diversity” precisely because VTech has place diversity on the very top rung of values, below which all other values must fall, whatever protestations of academic ambition may by made.

Virginia Tech Reasserts ‘Diversity’ Folly

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University—better known as Virginia Tech—is in the midst of an extraordinary campaign to impose a comprehensive regime focusedon “diversity.” Reading through Virginia Tech’s official documents since March is something like watching a colonial power laying out a plan to force its language, culture, laws, religion, and ideals on a subject people. The put-upon natives in this case are, first of all, the faculty of the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences. But the imperial power, of course, doesn’t mean to stop with subordinating the faculty chiefs to the Empire. The rule of Diversity must ultimately extend to every student and every employee.

Diversity? It must surely strike most readers that the ideological campaign for diversity on campus is by this point rather old-fashioned. Diversity as a rallying cry for the campus left took its initial impulse from Justice Lewis Powell’s opinion in the Supreme Court’s decision in the 1978 case, Bakke v. The Regents of the University of California. Powell’s remarks weren’t supported by any other justice and did not have the force of law, but they nonetheless suggested a rationale for using racial preferences in college admissions. A racially diverse college classroom, in Powell’s opinion, was bound to be a more pedagogically enriching one, since it stood to reason that people of different races would learn from each other.
……………………….

We draw attention to this university once again, however, not as a case study in vapid strategizing. Rather, it serves as a bookend to the whole diversity movement. Marx’s famous remark that great events and personalities in world history repeat themselves, “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce,” seems apt. Virginia Tech, a large regional university known more for its football program and a series of horrific killings, has chosen to play out a spent ideology to its final dregs. That it is does so in the delusion that it is somehow on the cutting edge of academic innovation is what makes this farce.

Farces are not without their victims. Virginia Tech is an institution of modest academic standing that seems intent on winning a certain kind of race to the bottom. Faculty members there have privately reassured us that the administrators aren’t as crazy as they sound. They are just playing the cards that they think they need to. It’s an excuse I don’t buy. The administrators have wrapped themselves in such fervent diversity rhetoric that we have to take them at their word. They may have started off as cynical players, but they are now totally invested in this folly and are surrounded with minions who are clearly true believers.

So the Virginia Tech story does seem worth yet another look. A large state university is spiraling downward into an anti-intellectual orthodoxy, and as it plummets it is busy praising its ability to take flight.

This is the beginning and ending of an article that is well worth reading in its entirety, if you want to understand the origins of the modern diversity movement.

Is this REALLY what you voted for?

Why it is that this story doesn’t get covered on ABC, CBS, NBC?  NY Times, Washington Post?

You know.

In Germany, home schooling is simply illegal. Is that going to happen in the USA, too?

N.H. High Court to Hear Case of Girl Ordered Out of Homeschooling

The New Hampshire Supreme Court has agreed to take up the case of a Christian girl who was ordered out of homeschooling and into a public school.

Attorneys for 10-year-old Amanda Kurowski argue that the lower court judge overstepped its authority when it determined that it would be in the best interest of the student to explore and examine new things, other than Christianity.

“Courts can settle disputes, but they cannot legitimately order a child into a government-run school on the basis that her religious views need to be mixed with other views. That’s precisely what the lower court admitted it is doing in this case, and that’s where our concern lies,” said Alliance Defense Fund- allied attorney John Anthony Simmons of Hampton.

The daughter of divorced parents, Amanda has been homeschooled by her mother, Brenda Voydatch, since first grade. Her father, Martin Kurowski, is opposed to homeschooling, arguing that it prevents “adequate socialization” for Amanda with other children. He requested that she be placed in a government school.

In the process of renegotiating the terms of a parenting plan for the girl, the Guardian ad Litem – who acts as a fact finder for the court – reported that Amanda was found to “lack some youthful characteristics,” partly because “she appeared to reflect her mother’s rigidity on questions of faith.”

Ms. Voydatch insisted that she does not push religion on Amanda and said her daughter’s choice to share her religious beliefs is a free choice.

The court, however, determined that “Amanda’s vigorous defense of her religious beliefs to the counselor suggests strongly that she has not had the opportunity to seriously consider any other point of view” and that enrolling her in a public school would expose her to a variety of points of view.

At the same time, the court found the girl to be “well liked, social and interactive with her peers, academically promising, and intellectually at or superior to grade level.”

Nevertheless, Judge Lucinda V. Sadler approved the GAL’s recommendation earlier this summer and ruled that it would be in Amanda’s best interests to attend a public school in the 2009-2010 academic year.

Simmons filed a motion to reconsider and stay the order. But the judge denied the motions and stated that the girl “is at an age when it can be expected that she would benefit from the social interaction and problem solving she will find in public school, and granting a stay would result in a lost opportunity for her.”

ADF Senior Legal Counsel Mike Johnson responded, “We are concerned anytime a court oversteps its bounds to tread on the right of a parent to make sound educational choices, or to discredit the inherent value of the homeschooling option. The lower court effectively determined that it would be a ‘lost opportunity’ if a child’s Christian views are not sifted and challenged in a public school setting. We regard that as a dangerous precedent.”

The previous post in this series is here.

In Minnesota, future teachers may be sent to re-education camp. (more at the link)

Do you believe in the American dream — the idea that in this country, hardworking people of every race, color and creed can get ahead on their own merits? If so, that belief may soon bar you from getting a license to teach in Minnesota public schools — at least if you plan to get your teaching degree at the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus.

In a report compiled last summer, the Race, Culture, Class and Gender Task Group at the U’s College of Education and Human Development recommended that aspiring teachers there must repudiate the notion of “the American Dream” in order to obtain the recommendation for licensure required by the Minnesota Board of Teaching. Instead, teacher candidates must embrace — and be prepared to teach our state’s kids — the task force’s own vision of America as an oppressive hellhole: racist, sexist and homophobic.

What is this article doing in the “Left at Christian Universities” series?  Because it illustrates how thoroughly the buzzwords of “diversity” are owned and promoted by the secular, anti-American Left.  It illustrates the essential impossibility of separating those perspectives from the word “diversity.”

How can “Christian diversity activists” at Christian universities hope to separate the word “diversity” from all its baggage, regardless of the application of other qualifiers?

It is not at all uncommon for much of the language in the article that was referenced here to be heard in diversity and multi-cultural presentations at Christian universities and colleges.  If you are a person of the Left, that probably doesn’t bother you much.  For the rest of us, it is a clear sign that the desire to be well-regarded by the secular Left has triumphed over traditional Christian expectations.

Will all good Christians be required to confess their racism and general bigotry, in writing, as a condition of employment?  Not quite yet, it seems.  But it does not seem impossible, given the way that Christian institutions continue to ape secular ones.

The clear challenge for Christian colleges and universities with education departments or schools is this:  how to satisfy the demands of the state credentialing apparatus without surrendering traditional Christian perspectives on values, the worth of human beings, etc.?

h/t: JW

The next post in this series is here.

Here’s the story of a New York Eagle Scout Suspended From School for 20 Days for Keeping Pocketknife in Car

A 17-year-old Eagle Scout in upstate New York has been barred from stepping foot on school grounds for 20 days — for keeping a 2-inch pocketknife locked in a survival kit in his car.

Read the whole thing.

Then ask yourself what’s wrong with the public schools, the education system, the courts, and maybe America in general.  Some people have well and truly lost their minds, and unfortunately they are the ones with power over the rest of us, and our children.

It’s simply embarrassing.  What would the American founders say about this?  What would anyone even 50 years ago say about this?

I do know this.  If I am ever in a tight situation, an earthquake maybe, or tornado, or flood, or just in need of help, I won’t be getting any useful assistance from the nitwits who pass these kinds of laws and make these kinds of regulations, but I will be getting help from any Eagle Scouts who happen to be around.  They will be the ones who are prepared to help, which means having both knowledge and the proper tools.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

The author of this article makes some very interesting comparisons and poignant observations about the Obama presidency and academic life.  It is worth reading every word.

In an attempt to “accentuate the positive,” the guys at Powerline detail exactly what they liked about Obama’s speech to school kids.

I ridiculed the Department of Education materials that accompany President Obama’s speech to American school children here, and I stand by the view that any self-respecting American schoolkid could only respond to such lameness with rebellion. But now I want to address the speech itself, which will mostly be good, if Obama sticks to the script. Consistent with this post’s theme, I’ll only mention the good parts.

Read their take on the positive aspects of the speech, with which I broadly agree.

And I have to say, Obama should be using his bully pulpit nearly every week to encourage poor inner city minorities to do the things that would improve their lives, and do less of the things that hurt them.   What if, instead of making a speech, he actually went to a school and talked on camera to a group of students who were getting ready to drop out?   Imagine if he supported inner city ministries whose entire mission is keeping black families with mothers AND fathers together?  Then he would be acting like he actually believed some of the things he said in his speech.   It would take courage for him to appear with someone like Jesse Peterson at an event to encourage black fatherhood.  He might offend Jesse Jackson, who hates Peterson.  But if Obama really wanted to “reach across the aisle,” that would surely be a very positive way to do it.

But I suppose he’s afraid of being compared to someone who has actually achieved something, like Bill Cosby.

Part and parcel of a living in a free society is the ability to make choices. For example, at election time our citizenry is allowed to choose between various political candidates running for public office. In countries where there is no freedom, so called “elections” are a sham because there is no choice, the ballots have but one candidate.

Here in the United States there is an ongoing battle over choice in education. On the one side there are those who seek greater freedom of choice for parents. Among the choices currently offered to a greater or lesser degree in various parts of our country are home schooling, school vouchers, and charter schools. On the other side there are those who seek to reduce or eliminate a parents right to choose the way they want their children educated. These seek to make public school attendance mandatory for ALL children.

Each of the alternatives I have mentioned are different. Each has been promoted or discouraged to greater or lesser degree at various times and places but to a parent, taken as a whole they represent choice in education. Each time one of those options is eliminated somewhere it can be said that a parent’s right to make choices concerning the education of their children has been negatively affected.

I believe our current president is no friend of school choice for parents. I have several points to mention in support of this statement. First is the Washington DC. school voucher plan the Obama Administration ended. In case you are unfamiliar with the story read this article.

This is a direct assault on freedom of choice in education. It is an action taken by Arne Duncan, President Obama’s selection for Secretary of Education. It can and should be cited as a concrete example that our current president does not favor choice in education.

Which leads me to my second point, and one which was mentioned in the article I quoted above. I think one of the reasons Obama has and will continue to demonstrate resistance to choice in education is that both he and the Democratic party are financially beholden to teacher unions in a big way and will not oppose the wishes of those unions in the area of educational choice. From the above-cited article:

It’s clear, though, from how the destruction of the program is being orchestrated, that issues such as parents’ needs, student performance and program effectiveness don’t matter next to the political demands of teachers’ unions. Congressional Democrats who receive ample campaign contributions from the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers laid the trap with budget language that placed the program on the block. And now comes Mr. Duncan with the sword. (emphasis mine)

It has been rightly said to get a true sense of what an organization supports one need only to follow the money. Just a cursory glance at the political contributions made by the NEA shows the virtual political alignment of that teacher’s union and the Democratic party. (read this article) And given the money spent by this union in support of an almost entirely Democratic slate is it unreasonable to assume our current president and Democrat-controlled congress will seek to do their bidding?

From the article cited in the previous paragraph let me point out the following quote:

There’s been a lot in the news recently about published opinion that parallels donor politics. Well, last year the NEA gave $45,000 to the Economic Policy Institute, which regularly issues reports that claim education is underfunded and teachers are underpaid. The partisans at People for the American Way got a $51,000 NEA contribution; PFAW happens to be vehemently anti-voucher.

The extent to which the NEA sends money to states for political agitation is also revealing. For example, Protect Our Public Schools, an anti-charter-school group backed by the NEA’s Washington state affiliate, received $500,000 toward its efforts to block school choice for underprivileged children.

So the NEA has contributed money to groups that are both anti-voucher and anti-charter schools. Given the Obama administrations stated support of charter schools elsewhere this can at best be considered a mixed message though I doubt anyone would think of it as a ringing endorsement of parental choice in education. ( I acknowledge the WSJ article is more than 3 years old, but does anyone want to make the claim that the NEA zebra has recently changed its stripes?)

Point three and potentially most pernicious is President Obama’s support of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child. (See harmonicminers earlier blog on this subject) While not yet adopted by the US, the potential for elimination of parent choice in education is there if this is embraced by the current administration. (If you have any doubt about Obama’s willingness to accede to the demands of the United Nations, even at the cost of our sovereignty, read this article about his sponsorship of Senate bill 2433). Of note too is the author cited by harmonicminer. He is co-founder, chairman and general counsel of the Home School Legal Defense Association. This organization did not come about because our government has a track record of embracing homeschooling (as an educational choice), and this current president has shown time and time again he favors greater governmental intrusion and control over almost everything. One might say it has the potential of a perfect storm, brewing on the horizon for parents who wish to exercise freedom of choice in the education of their children.