School Daze

Sending your kid (or someone else’s) to public school is as good a bet as forking over thousands a year for a private institution according to a report just put out by the department of education.

Here’s a complete article published a few days ago in the “San Diego Union-Tribune.”

The report was put out by the U.S. Department Education.

For those of you weak on government structure, that’s part of the executive branch and, hence, part of the Bush administration’s apparatus (for just a few more years, thank God).

And that’s relative for the usual reasons: the administration’s dishonesty, raw politics, and obfuscation.

the scribe says this because the article written by Diana Jean Schemo of the New York Times News Service makes fairly clear that the administration didn’t want you to know about the study and released it without a press conference, on a Friday morning (considered the “bottom” of the news cycle) largely because the results aren’t what it had hoped for.

Here’s some stuff from the article about that: “Reg Weaver, president of the National Education Association, the union for millions of teachers, said the findings showed that public schools were ‘doing an outstanding job’ and if the results had been favorable to private schools, ‘there would have been press conferences and glowing statements about private schools.’

‘The administration has been giving public schools a beating since the beginning,’ Weaver said, to advance [p]resident Bush’s political agenda of promoting charter schools and taxpayer-financed vouchers for private schools as alternatives to failing traditional public schools.”

Weaver of course is part of a union, a teachers union at that; one of the Democratic Party’s pillars.

The only union Bush can relate to is the one he slices for putting on his buffalo burger while down at the ranch and Crawford, Texas (pronounced, “UN-yun”).

An administration spokesperson said the report was only of “moderate utility,” which means it does nothing to promote its agenda and therefore qualifies, like so many biological opinions on environmental issues, as “bad science.”

These guys take the cake.

Their vision of America is 300 million tiny parcels split up by fences, security gates, behind which education is achieved by home-schoolers. They have no sense of public enterprise; the village square is a place where the homeless sleep on rounded benches, not where citizens gather to shape a national life together.

They’ve even gone rather far in the privatization of war.

And while the report may be of “modest utility” to the Bushies, it turns out to be a Godsend for thus of us whose tax breaks won’t cover the cost of sending junior to a private institution.

The facts: In reading and math, kids in public schools do “as well, or better” than those who go to private school.

Conservative Christian schools lagged way behind (Biblical prose can be a burden in the information age).

Eighth grade private school students read better than their public school counterparts.

(Ya see W? It’s not so hard to tell the whole truth.)

If you’re going the religious route, you might go Lutheran because kids in those schools fared well in eighth grade math, outpacing those drinking from the public trough.

The article quotes someone from the Council for American Private Education saying, “In the real world, private school kids outperform public school kids.”

The real world?

That’s where fact and fiction get confused, where weapons of mass destruction are found in recreational vehicles and global warming is the product of “alarmist” mentalities.

Must be nice to live there.