01 Aug 2005 - 21:13

Mike Piscal on the public schools

Go read Mike Piscal right now.

You might want to scroll down and begin with his first post, which ends with this:

There are four special interests that have blocked, clogged, and undermined reform for decades. It is all about money, control, and power. It is diseased value system that leaves our kids uneducated, exposed to violence and drugs, and with too few or zero opportunities to pursue the American Dream. Who are the four? Emphatically, I name names: the teacher’s unions, the University Schools of Education, the bureaucracies, and (unbelievably) the PTA’s.

In my blogs, I will name the leaders of these entities and expose their lies, their self-interest, and their unwillingness to change the status quo.

I'm looking forward to hearing what he has to say about the PTA.


Here's Thomas Toch, of Brookings:

The PTA has particularly strong ties to teacher unions. Charlotte Frass, chief Washington lobbyist for the American Federation of Teachers, said, "We often lobby together." Ties are even close to the nation's other leading teachers union, the National Education Association. One of the PTA's three Washington lobbyists is married to an N.E.A. lobbyist, and from the founding of the PTA's Washington legislative office in 1978 through 1993, its lobbyists were housed in rent-reduced offices in the N.E.A.'s headquarters a few block from the White House.

Like the unions, the PTA pushes relentlessly for more federal education financing. Earlier this year more than 200 PTA political activists descended on Capitol Hill, urging members of Congress to back the Clinton administration's proposals for $25 billion in federally subsidized school-construction bonds and $5 billion in grants to reduce public school class sizes.

The organization rejects the belief of many would-be school reformers today that public schools would work harder to improve if they had to compete for students and financing. "There are always winners and losers in a marketplace," Maribeth Oakes, the PTA's legislative director, said, "and we shouldn't have an education system where there are losers." The group has backed charter school laws only if they require that the hybrid public schools report to traditional school boards. Critics contend that strips the schools of the very independence that is the basis of the charter concept.

And here's Chester Finn:

[the PTA has] been politicized, ideologized, bureaucratized and, at least in the PTA's case, has become part of the public-education establishment, more interested in propping up institutional claims and employee interests than advancing the interests of parents and kids. 'All T and no P' is how I've come to describe the National PTA and its state affiliates. ... I can't name a single policy issue of consequence at the state or national level where the PTA's testimony doesn't mirror that of the NEA and/or AFT.

(thanks to Illinois Loop)

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