U.S. Educator Report Card: Math F, Science F, Reading D-, Socialism A+

The 2012 education PISA* rankings indicate that the USA came in at 25th for math, 14th for reading and 17th for science out of 30 countries with only three of those countries spending slightly more money per pupil than America. Yet the mantra for more money, benefits and taxes for education continue just as it has for the last sixty years. If more money will solve the education problem then why hasn't it ever worked in the last sixty years? The plan is to spend more money to improve eighth grade students so they can pass a fifth grade equivalence test by the time they graduate from the twelfth grade. Our students are learning, but mostly how to pretend that they are educated.

One could argue that many of our students today are less educated than the eighth grade education received by our great grandparents over one hundred years ago. Indeed large portions of our nation today are illiterate and cannot even read, write, nor reason at what used to be the eighth grade level. The response to this problem, for the past fifty years, has been to lower the standards and create more failed social experiments in our schools. Even the basic arithmetic of our national debt is now obviously beyond the ability of most of our citizens and many of our elected officials. The problems are not teachers themselves but rather the monopolistic education system that ignores performance and rewards failures. We need a self correcting mechanism that continuously improves the system. The best system would be market oriented through competition, school choice and the freedom to choose.

Every socialist statistician is now spinning these pathetic PISA student assessment numbers into new theories postulating that only more money will solve our problems when in fact the problems are systemic in nature. It is not our students that are failing, rather by any measure, it is the American education system itself and governance that has failed. According to the Friedman foundation as government has assumed a increasingly larger role in education, and while spending has increased to record historical highs, the quality of education and student performance standards have declined. If that sounds like Health Care, Housing, Auto Manufacturing, Energy, Finance or countless other government run industries then Reagan was surely right when he said, " Government is not the answer to our problems. Government is the problem."

Embarrassingly, some third world countries and even Russia are outperforming American educators at much less than half the cost. Indeed some cities in America that spend twice as much as our national average have poorer performance. Substituting state sponsored indoctrination for education, our socialist education system has failed once again because it will not change.

Even now, another trillion dollars in Sallie Mae education loan programs are in default and near bankruptcy that will threaten scores of bloated pretentious educational institutions in America who issue little pieces of paper extolling pretend education for the unemployable with neither skills nor jobs. Soon we will need another two or three trillion in tax payer debt to bail out yet another government created disaster called Sallie Mae (much like Fannie May and Freddie Mac, Socialist inSecurity, Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps, Disability Trust Fund, the Prescription Drug Program, etc.). Name any government run program and you have another financial disaster that will soon run out of money - just like education.

Increased taxes and class warfare will not save any socialist program nor benefit any current or future recipients of such entitlements. The big lie is that our state and federal governments can spend and tax our way out of a socialist economic calamity. Even bigger lies are those that claim education can be improved with more money and that a margin tax will produce more revenue for education. The biggest and oldest lie of all is that socialism has ever worked, or ever will.

Teachers Unions claim to care more about education than money. Let us test that proposition by amending the Margin tax on business to include the salaries and benefits, of teachers and their unions, that represent their own narrow self interests rather than the public good. Let us tax teachers salaries, benefits, retirement, and union dues at the same rate they propose to tax business because education is the largest business in America. Education is far larger than most private sector business. This would insure an increasing revenue base since the growth in government workers, and their unions, remain unchecked. The growth in these new teacher tax revenues would be far greater than those of any private business sector, especially since a margin tax destroys jobs. The collected tax could be used to fund school choice and introduce competition to break up the government education monopoly. Change will eventually happen anyway due to improved on-line education using the Internet. Why not speed up this process of change?

Ten percent of Nevada's purported electorate composed mostly of self serving; teachers, their colleagues, government union members, families, friends and associates have petitioned the State Legislature to pass a Margin tax on business. This Margin Tax, without the consent of the majority of more than ninety percent of the voters, rewards education failures using; misinformation, deception and outright lies. Let us then also petition our legislature to amend that law to include all the self interested members of the education monopoly by passing an Education Business Teachers Tax to fund school choice and provide the education consumer with the freedom to choose.

Business is already paying a high tax in costs for training of their workers in basic literacy skills like reading, writing and arithmetic just so they can function in a minimum wage job. Rather than pass a margin tax on business, which will lower revenues and destroy jobs, we should instead use this same petition to directly tax the education business to create innovation, school choice and competition that will begin to replace parts of our dysfunctional and failed education monopoly. Our government run education monopoly is a taxpayer funded growth industry and a far more reliable means to fund school choice than the few remaining businesses that will likely be bankrupted through increased taxation. Even a small tax on the existing education business could provide substantial improvements with larger cost savings.

Based on Americas track record and the history of attempts to improve education, school choice remains the only untried solution and America's best hope for a future that includes a literate electorate.

If you wish to help improve education, send a copy of this article to your Nevada State Legislator and ask them to support school choice and oppose both the Margin Tax and the government education monopoly. The Education lobby after helping elect socialists, who have destroyed our economy and decreased tax revenues, should not escape from the folly of their own socialist officials and the economic recession caused by socialist programs. It is time for The People of Nevada to now educate the Teachers Unions and their political operatives just as The People of Wisconsin have done.

* Note: PISA is a Programme for International Student Assessment

see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PISA for more information on International student assessments.

For those interested in improving education the following information links may be useful.

References: Education Improvement Related Links:

http://www.edchoice.org/
http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/
http://www.oecd.org/pisa/
http://www.google.com/edu/teachers/
http://stosselintheclassroom.org/
http://educationnext.org/
http://educationnext.org/first-we-need-a-brand-new-k%E2%80%9312-system/
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/pepg/