Learn From the Brits:

Parents Pulling Out of Big Bureaucracy Schools

 

Just as we prepare to install the first board members of the socialistic Learning Community in the Omaha metropolitan area this fall, news from Great Britain shows how poorly socialistic school organizations are, and how much parents hate them.

 

According to the London-based www.telegraph.co.uk in an article today, "Successful Schools Hugely Oversubscribed, Figures Show," there are long waiting lists for private schools, faith-based schools, and independent but state-funded schools that are like U.S. charter schools. But in sharp contrast, there is sharply declining enrollment in the government-run schools.

 

The article contends that "families have lost confidence in council-controlled secondaries." The only parents who still enroll their children in the government schools are those who don't know their options, or don't care about education, officials quoted in the article said.

 

In some British non-public schools, there are as many as 18 applicants for every open spot. Nearly a third of them have five times as many applications as places to put kids.

 

Noting this phenomenon, the Conservative Party has pledged to create hundreds of independent state schools free from the "suffocating bureaucracy" of central and local government, the article reported. Those operate like charter schools in the United States.

 

The reason for the disdain for public schools: they are built around "learning standards," which have dumbed down the curriculum, according to education officials. The private and independent schools aren't as constrained.

 

Who warned about widespread adoption of curricular "standards" in Nebraska, years ago? Moi. Who listened? Not the State Board of Education, or anyone else who might have stopped the dumbing down.

 

Bottom line: let's take a clue from our friends across the Pond, who've been there and done that. We'd be much better off helping disadvantaged kids in the Omaha area with an aggressive charter-school enabling law, attractive private scholarship tax credits, and tuition tax credits, than miring all 11 school districts in the bureaucratic cement of a Learning Community.