Every American leader with any sphere of influence in whatever walk of life should see the recent ABC television report by John Stossel entitled “Stupid in America”, a scathing expose of the irrational perversity that is so deeply imbedded in the American public school system and the severe damage that this archaic culture and delivery system are doing to our children and our future.As I watched this report, I was immediately struck by the timing of it, coming as it did within days of two related events—the veto by Wisconsin’s governor of a bill that would have expanded the cap on the availability of slots in Milwaukee’s fifteen-year old, very successful school voucher program and the decision by the Florida Supreme Court striking down that state’s successful six-year old voucher program after a teacher union-led lawsuit. It occurred to me that, added to the historical absence of credibility of the age-old arguments by the protectionist interests against market-based/competitive education reform, with these two events this crowd has now reached the pure obstructionist threshold without an ounce of merit in their case, proving without doubt that their worst fear and perceived threat is the very success of such innovations, which belies any argument that they have the best interests of children at heart.
I have long maintained that, for all our strides in accountability and standards based education reform over the past decade, the easier phases of reform are behind us, because the next, much more difficult phase will require major adjustments in adult behavior in the forms of transformation of human resource management and the introduction of fully competitive delivery systems, both of which are anathema to the vested interests. These steps will not happen without serious political pain, and until our political and business leadership elites are fully committed to the confrontation with these interests and the pain of real accountability, we have no hope of getting to the next level of reform and our children who are most vulnerable and at-risk will continue to bear the brunt of this abdication of responsibility.
