Barron's reports:
Of the nearly half-trillion dollars Americans gave to charities last year, 17%, or $76 billion, went to educational causes, according to the Atlas of Giving. That makes education the second-biggest draw of philanthropic dollars, after churches. Nice but misleading. Half of America’s children are academically ineligible to serve in our military, let alone create the jobs of the future. The state of public education is one of the most pressing national issues of our time, but you’d never know it from the tepid media coverage.
That’s no exaggeration. Read the Council on Foreign Relations’ 2012 education report, compiled by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former New York City education chancellor, Joel Klein. “The American Dream,” they concluded, is becoming “the American Memory” on our watch, as we divide into “two countries—one educated and one not, one employable and one not.”
We all need to own up to our role in creating this disaster. Too often we, wealthy Americans, give to our rich alma maters rather than to the out-of-sight impoverished neighborhood schools that really need our support. Partly for this reason, Klein wrote Lessons of Hope, a straight-shooting, immensely readable account of his eight-year tenure as Michael Bloomberg’s education czar, and the blackboard lessons that resulted.
When the Establishment's Council on Foreign Relations is worried about public education, it must be worrying the central planners. There's more:
Democrats and Republicans alike, he says, must first recognize that public education is a “broken, government-run monopoly serving the needs of adults at the expense of the needs of children.” The only way forward, Klein says, is to offer underprivileged families real educational choices, breaking the states’ monopoly on education and the perverse union rules strangling public education all across the nation.
Start by leaving your comfort zone and funneling capital away from your wealthy alma mater and toward the poor neighborhoods, where your generosity is truly needed. “A lot of people say to me, ‘I won’t give to public schools because I don’t think it will do anything,’ ” Klein says. He sends such skeptics to tough neighborhoods where charter schools run by the likes of KIPP, Success Academy, and Achievement First are making a real difference.
There is a great way to school your kid. No one has gotten shot, pregnant, or missed one day of education because of a teachers strike studying the
Ron Paul Curriculum.
