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Advanced Worldview Analysis - Lesson 23

Problems with Public Education

The public school system in the United States has fostered functional illiteracy, cultural illiteracy, and moral/spiritual illiteracy.

Ronald Nash
Advanced Worldview Analysis
Lesson 23
Watching Now
Problems with Public Education

Philosophy of Education and the Christian Worldview
Part 1
 

I.  Introduction

 

II.  Three Kinds of Illiteracy Fostered by American Public Schools

A.  Functional Illiteracy

B.  Cultural Illiteracy

C.  Moral/Spiritual Illiteracy

 

III.  Some Causes of the Crisis

A.  Incompetent Teachers

B.  Professional Educationists

C.  Indifferent Parents

D.  NEA

E.  State Monopoly

F.  Public School Finances


Lessons
About
Transcript
  • Discussion of the content of a worldview and the criteria used to evaluate worldviews.

  • Discussion of liberalism and conservatism, and statism and anti-statism.

  • Political systems fall along a continuum between the extremes of anarchism and totalitarianism.

  • People favoring statism support extensive government involvement in education and social programs.

  • From a biblical point of view, statism is evil.

  • Discussion of justice on an individual and corporate level.

  • An economy based on capitalism has much less government involvement than an economy based on socialism.

  • Interventionism is a capitalistic economic system in which government gets involved to allow free exchange within a framework of laws.

  • Discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of capitalism.

  • Two basic concepts of economics are limited resources and the choices we make that reflect our values.

  • Marxism is an economic system based on the idea of a class struggle with the goal of a classless society.

  • Article from The Free Market

  • The Bible and Socialism, Moral Defense of Capitalism

  • We are responsible to be a good steward of the wealth God gives us to manage.

  • Some of the root causes of poverty are government, social and religious systems.

  • Liberation theology is an ideology promoted by people trained in Marxism. True liberation theology delivers people from tyranny, poverty and sin.

  • Christians ought to care about poverty and oppression. People who hold differing economic and social theories propose very different approaches and solutions to these problems.

  • Discussion of the differences between evangelical liberals and conservatives.

  • Guest Lecturer, Alejandro Moreno-Morrison discussing the inflation of rights.

  • Guest Lecturer, Alejandro Moreno-Morrison discusses legal positivism.

  • A balanced approach toward environmentalism is needed because it can be a serious threat to individual liberty.

  • Discussion of how people work in a capitalistic system to address environmental concerns.

  • The public school system in the United States has fostered functional illiteracy, cultural illiteracy, and moral/spiritual illiteracy.

  • Discussion of the pros and cons of setting up a voucher system to fund the education system.

In this class, you will gain a comprehensive understanding of advanced worldview analysis, starting with an introduction to the concept of a worldview and its importance. You will explore the various components that make up a worldview, including epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and anthropology. The course delves into analyzing different worldviews such as theism, deism, naturalism, nihilism, and existentialism. Finally, you will learn about the role of the church and individual believers in engaging with culture and responding to worldview challenges, as well as strategies for effective communication of your own worldview.

Dr. Ronald Nash

Advanced Worldview Analysis

th710-23

Problems with Public Education

Lesson Transcript

[00:00:02] Well as the hundreds of students who come every week. Now we pray every time we have a class. But since this is our last class, I'll lead us in prayer and we'll do that right now. Heavenly Father, we thank you for guiding us as we've dealt with these difficult issues. We have before us the issue of education. And in many ways this might be the most important one that we talk about in the course. There are other important issues that we haven't had time to cover. We pray that you'll be with us tonight. We know that there are burdens and problems among the student body, and we pray for each one in need that you deliver them from evil, solve their problems, and we'll thank you. In Jesus name, Amen. Okay. For this part of the course, which is education, I have another one of my books. This book was published in 1990. The publisher approached me about, I don't know, one or two years before that, and we already had the title. Let's say I've done 35 books. How many times has the publisher initiated that? Not very often. Usually I'm the one that has to initiate it. A couple of years before I was approached about writing my book. A philosopher at the University of Chicago published. I'm thinking of the book The Closing of the American Mind Blown published a book that just became a blockbuster, sold well over a million copies, but it was perceived widely to be a conservative book. Actually, Blum's book was not that conservative. The first 90 pages of the book, yes, but the other 200 pages of the book don't make any sense at all. Now, I have a theory about this, and that is he had a nice 90 page manuscript about education, and he hit the nail on the head, which is an original expression that I use now.

 

[00:02:04] But then his publisher, whichever publisher it was, said to him, Well, this is a good book, 90 pages, but we don't want to publish a 90 page book. And you come up with another 150 or 200 pages. And my theory is he went into his files in the University of Chicago, and he picked up some papers that he'd read somewhere but had never been published. And he stuck them in at the back of the book. And everybody bought the book for the first 90 pages. And no one and I still have no idea what he was talking about. In fact, I think I even criticized him in here because the last part of his book is really quite inconsistent with the conservative tone of the first half of the book. Anyway, my publisher came to me and they said, We want you to do a book titled The Closing of the American Heart. Wow, that's great. If Alan Blum sells a million copies, I ought to sell a half a million copies. Well, even though this was for many years my best selling book, it never quite met the audience that Lumet. Oh, there's a foreword to this book was written by R.C. Sproule. Well, so that's not bad. And then the subtitle of the book is What's Really Wrong with America's Schools. Now we're going to talk generally about the crisis in American education. And whenever I pick up the USA Today or the Orlando Sentinel and I'm reading about all of these horrible calamities around the world, every other section of the paper, there's some horrible revelation about the abominable public school mess in this entire country. And the solution to this abominable mess in public schools was clarified in this 1990 book called The Closing of the American Heart.

 

[00:03:53] It's still in print. Once you print these things, you've got to sell them. So if any of you want to sell a copy to this book, to every student at Harvard, they're available from pro books in Richardson, Texas. Okay. Now, time is short. This is going to be our last class. I'm going to cover quite a bit of material and I'll try to give you an outline on the board, because I'm going to be throwing a lot of numbers and statistics at you and you'll have trouble getting them. Let's call this chapter one. Actually, what I'm giving you is material from a different book that never got published. But this will give you some kind of a reference point and an outline of the material that I'm going to give you. Perhaps the most damning evidence of the crisis in America's schools today is apparent in what I call the three kinds of illiteracy in America. Now, this is material that appears in the closing of the American heart, but the numbers have not gotten better. They have actually gotten worse. Now, these three kinds let's call this the crisis in American education crisis, and then this will revolve around the three kinds of illiteracy. And then after we identify the crisis, then we'll begin to identify the causes of the crisis. The first kind of illiteracy that plagues America's public schools is functional illiteracy. Let me give you a definition of functional illiteracy. Somebody is functionally illiterate. If he or she cannot read, write or use numbers sufficiently well to get along in our society. Now, at the time I wrote the closing of the American Heart, these statistics were being tossed around the country. According to Time magazine, for example, 13% of all American 17 year olds at that time were functionally illiterate.

 

[00:05:59] They couldn't read, they couldn't write, they couldn't use numbers. 13%. How many of you think the number of functionally illiterate 17 year olds in America has gone down? You're the people that voted for Bill Clinton. I know you did. I know you did. How many of you think the illiteracy rate has climbed? Yeah. And what parts of America is the illiteracy rate the worst? The inner cities of America? The children of which kinds of parents are the worst victims of whatever the causes of functional illiteracy are. Minorities. Black kids, Hispanic kids. The poor. But I guarantee if you walked over to the high school in this city and I won't name it, even though it's baseball team I think is competing for the baseball championship in the state of Florida, I'll guarantee that. There are a lot of people on that baseball team and even more on the football team and even a higher percentage on the basketball team, probably who are functionally illiterate. And it isn't funny. Even back in 1989, among minority youth, the rate of functional illiteracy was 40% across the country, 13 then among minorities, 40%. I guarantee that's up around 60, 70% right now. The U.S. Department of Education back then estimated that our educational system had already left us with 24 million functional illiterates. That was 13 years ago. Looking at some of the people who show up on some of these television talk shows were up around 40%, maybe 40 million. These are not people who never went to school. These functional illiterates are, for the most part, people who spent 8 to 12 years in America's public schools back then. Back then, 95% of American 17 year olds could not read well enough to understand technical materials and literary essays.

 

[00:08:22] 95% of American 17 year olds. That means back then that only 5% of America's 17 year olds could read well enough to understand the Bible. 5% of American 17 year olds could read well enough to understand the Bible. If that doesn't put. This situation in perspective. Now, the second kind of illiteracy is cultural illiteracy. Oh, boy, someone is culturally illiterate. If he is ignorant of basic information that is necessary for one to get along in society. Now I've picked out what for 1989 were important pieces of information to me. For example, back then, almost one third of America's 17 year olds did not know that Columbus discovered the New World before 1751 33%. Now, in my day when Abraham Lincoln was president. We all learned that in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. What's this business about? 1754? Petty say 40% of America 17 year olds were ignorant of the fact that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor occurred between 1939 and 1943. Now, the latest statistic is that 95% of Americans, 17 year olds think that Ben Affleck, the actor, was in charge of Pearl Harbor whenever the Japanese attacked it, or around 1979 or something like that. Almost 75% of American 17 year olds could not place Lincoln's presidency within the correct 20 year span. You know, Lincoln, he's the guy that died in 1920, something like that. I don't know. Almost 50% could not place Franklin Roosevelt's presidency. Now that I can understand, that's worth forgetting. Roosevelt's presidency. But they couldn't place it within the years between 1929 and 1946. These are not difficult or trivial matters of information. This illiteracy about history is not something found in the backwoods of some third rate nation. This abysmal ignorance exists among American youth who have had 11 years of public school education, who are one year away from getting a high school diploma, and who soon will be college students as though college is going to increase their cultural.

 

[00:11:11] Literacy. Oh, man. And I've got other statistics here from the nineties. 85% of American eighth graders lack proficiency in American history. 57% of high school seniors are below basic in history. 75% of high school seniors lack proficiency in geography. I'll give you a few examples of that later on. And again, black and Hispanic kids are being treated in such an evil way. Not long ago, a newspaper carried a story about the tainted athletic program at a well-known East Coast university. Now, I want to name some places here, but boy, I can see myself getting letters from Duke University graduates in places. I don't know that this was Duke. Duke's got a pretty good basketball program, I understand. But one of the school's prides athletes was being tutored in the hopes of prolonging his athletic ability abilities. He wasn't eligible to play in his freshman year and his junior year. And so the tutor asked the student to name the country immediately to the south of the United States. The kid said Canada. Fortunately, the tutor knew the right answer. There are places where the tutors don't know either. So the tutor said to this kid, Let me give you a hint. This is a country where the people speak Spanish. They do, don't they? Yes. All right. And with a confident smile, the student gave his new answer. Spain directly south of the United States. Samuel Blumenfeld, the guy who's written some good stuff on all of this. He's some things up. The plain, unvarnished truth is that public education, government, schools in America is a shoddy, fraudulent piece of goods sold to the public at an astronomical price. It's time the American consumer knew the extent of the fraud, which is victimizing millions of children each year.

 

[00:13:21] Now, why is there no nationwide anger here, although there are pockets of it? Why does no politician even dare to breathe? The solutions to these problems, although the Bush brothers are getting pretty close, pretty daring. One way to judge the job the government schools are doing is to see how people are voting with their feet. Here's a quotation from U.S. News and World Report. Many parents view the public schools as ineffective and dangerous and are exploring other options before it's too late. U.S. News and World Report warned that the nation's faith in its public schools is fading fast. And it's not fading fast enough for me. And then finally, the third kind of illiteracy is moral and spiritual illiteracy. Hence the title of my book, The Closing of the American Heart. Now, listen to this. The inadequacies of contemporary education are not exclusively matters of the mind. Traditional religious and moral values are under assault at every level of public and higher education. Our educational system is engaged in a systematic undermining of these values. No real progress towards improving American education can occur as long as 90% of American children are being taught in government schools that ignore or attack moral and spiritual values. There has been an all out campaign at many levels of our society to cut moral and religious values from our schools. There is an unmistakable bias against religious and moral values in our public schools and in higher education. The bias runs deep and can no longer be corrected by anything as simple as a reform of our present system. During my first lecture trip to what was then still called the Soviet Union in 1991, and I'm still amazed the fellow, whoever he was, dared to say it a highly placed official in the Soviet government.

 

[00:15:29] This was not a crypto Baptist. This was a high placed individual in the Soviet government, admitted a major reason for the collapse of the Soviet Union. He said this 70 years ago, this nation, Soviet Union, kicked God out. And ever since there has been a moral and spiritual vacuum at the center of this nation. And in the years since that analysis of Soviet decline, Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union have reached unbelievable depths of corruption. Now, I'm going to skip a great deal of material that appears in that part of the book. There's an important link between mind and character, but you can read that without any problem. So since we have to keep moving, let me now try to identify the causes of this crisis. And the first cause is incompetent teachers. Whenever I get on this subject, my wife, she kicks me under the table or something else. And she says, Ronald, remember to remind your audience that there still are some good, competent teachers left in the public schools of America. But the fact is, their numbers are declining rapidly, and many people are just giving up and leaving the public schools out of frustration. Because even when the teachers are dedicated, some incompetent. And I almost added some other adjectives, but some incompetent administrator or member of the school board or whatever else will prevent them from doing the things that people are supposed to do. A growing body of evidence suggests that many teachers are woefully undereducated. But ten years ago I was preaching at a a church in Jacksonville. I can't name the church. Southern suburbs delivered a message somewhat like this when the book comes out. You start speaking all over the country because you're an authority on education.

 

[00:17:44] And after the service, a lady who was a veteran teacher of the Jacksonville City system told me this story. That she was called in to substitute in, I think, a fourth grade special ed class in case some of you don't know what that means. You've got some very slow kids in this special ed class. The teacher was out that day and it just happened to put it in our mini in terms that the husband of this substitute teacher worked for the electrical company, the power company in Jacksonville, and he had to come into her classroom, the special ed classroom, and do some work. And then that night at supper, he said, Honey, I couldn't help but notice how every letter E in that room was backwards. Let me see if I can write an E backwards, I guess. No, that's right. That's right. You've got to really work at writing the letter E backwards. And he said, Honey, it must be tough to try and teach kids who are that handicapped. And his wife said to him, Honey, that wasn't the work of the pupils who are special ed students. All of that illiteracy was the work of the teacher. The teacher who was illiterate. And then I learned what happened here. This was an affirmative action hiring. This was a young lady who was functionally illiterate and culturally illiterate. When she finished high school. She never should have been allowed to. And then she went to some great teachers college. Where nobody knows anything. And that's just the professors that I'm talking about. Nobody knows anything. And she was functionally illiterate when she went in, and she was functionally illiterate when she came out. But they put her in charge of a class that was not special.

 

[00:20:08] Ed And the parents found out. But instead of firing this incompetent and functionally illiterate person who was hired simply so the school would meet some racial quota. Academic quotas don't exist in America's public schools. They moved her into the special ed class because they figured with handicapped kids the parents would never figure out how dumb she was. I'm still. Look at me. That was ten, 11 years ago and still mad. I'd like to be in the same room with the administrators who did that. I mean, there's no integrity on the part of these people. Functionally illiterate people. They moved her instead to a special ed class. In my book, I think it's this book. I tell another story about how there was a minority student, and I'm not picking on minority people here. You've got to understand that. But she was working on a master's degree in education at some college in Connecticut. Maybe it was Amherst College, and she again, was functionally and culturally illiterate. And she happened to take a course from a psychology professor. Who? Heavens to Betsy failed her. Now, you never do that in a teacher's college. Everybody in a teacher's college gets straight A's in every course they take. Unless they happen to quote the Bible. Then they'll fail, Of course. And six months later, this psychology Prof who and you got to understand, at the master's level, an F means you're out of the program. He saw this lady's name on the graduation list. Now, that's a miracle. That's akin to the virgin birth. For someone to do that. And so he went back through her records and the administrators in their teachers, Ed College, had tossed away all of her failing grades and had substitute Mickey Mouse courses where she got straight A's.

 

[00:22:23] And she's out there now messing up the education of minority kids in whatever community she works. And I know I'm safe legally to say that, because she won't be able to understand even this tape recording of this message. Do you understand? I have here in my formerly noxious stained fingers. Yeah. Quotations. Written statement. Who does this sort of thing? Over the radio. I don't know. Here. This is a Time magazine article. I don't know. The time would dare publish it anymore. Title Help. Teacher can't Teach. Okay, Now, here's a story about a Chicago public school teacher who answered a news reporter's question with the words. I teaches English. I teaches English. A third grade teacher in Chicago wrote the following sentence on a blackboard. Put the following words in alphabetical order. Alphabetical. Being misspelled, of course. A fifth grade teacher in Mobile, Alabama. The proud holder of a master of education degree. There's a real winning degree, folks, man. You can tell the stress I'm under here. She wrote a note home to one of her students parents. Scott is dropping in his study drop studies. That's almost as bad as dropping in his pants, I guess. I don't know. Scott is dropping in his studies. No punctuation mark, so he acts as if he don't care. Scott won't pass in his assignment at all. Again, no punctuation. He had a poem to learn and he failed to do it. Well, I hope he didn't hurt himself. And again, this is enough to make you cry. If anything has changed in the last 17 years, fifth graders no longer have to worry about memorizing poem. Incompetent teacher. Listen, I taught at. Oh, why do I want to name this school? No, I stopped myself. Formerly known as a state teachers college in some state which I can no longer remember the name of.

 

[00:24:42] And I served on committees with faculty from the Teachers College. Did I not tell you one day if I did, just humor me and let me say it again for the sake of the tape. I'm sure I did tell you that when I got Masters Degree Students to work in the Master's degree program in the Humanities. I think academic excellence here. I always had to get the approval of the faculty from the College of Education for any students who wanted to come and study philosophy. And we had this graduate of Cambridge University. I know I told you this before, who for some reason wanted I mean, he practically begged us to admit him because he wanted to study, I guess, with me or somebody else. And those I'm trying to drop out all the adjectives that are coming to my mind here. These hopeless people refused him admission because he didn't graduate from a regionally accredited university. All right. My goodness. Oh, dear. Now, I know some people here won't know how dumb that really is. I've got to explain the joke here, too, though. I'm not insulting my tape audience here. But a British university like Cambridge and Oxford are not regionally accredited. They set the standard. And when I challenged one of these professors from the School of Education, she said, Well, if we admit somebody from a non accredited school like Oxford or Cambridge, the next thing you'll know the people from Liberty University will want to get in here. Oh, my goodness. Or the University of Mexico. My goodness. Mexico. Oh, you can. Well, all right. Now, the second cause and see if there's any logical connection here. The first cause would be incompetent teachers. Remembering again that there are really good people who are still trying to do this.

 

[00:26:54] I'm not putting everybody in this incompetent teacher. Next point. Professional educationists. The teachers of the teachers, professional educationists. Now, again, there are some good people here. My daughter went to Liberty and took a master of education degree there and is today. Without question, one of the finest teachers. And I was going to say the American Southeast was east of the Mississippi, let's put it that way. Fine teacher. My daughter is, but she's not teaching in a public school. She teaching in a private school. They're professional educationists. Now, these are the people who run the Departments of Education and the Colleges of Education and the schools of education. Making America's schools so bad. Let me tell you, one guy. Oh, I should get on my knees and confess my sins. I was head of the philosophy department at this school that I've decided not to name. And one of my colleagues got a grant to spend a year at Harvard. So I had to replace him for one year. And that was a little hard to do. And so the dean of the School of Government or something at this nameless university, he had a friend who was a professional educationist. Now, I didn't know how bad these people were back then. I claiming ignorance, and I'm going to write this guy's first name on the board in case any relatives of his. Here was his first name. You're not laughing. You're all right. And that's his first name? Yes. So this friend with whom I played golf, he said, well, why don't you hire this guy for one year? And he was teaching education at a school in Mississippi. So I figured, what harm can he do? What harm can he do? I'll stick him with for introduction to philosophy classes.

 

[00:29:12] He'll have 54 people in each class. What harm can he do? They all know the name of Socrates and Plato when the course is over. In those days, we registered in the basketball arena. Today they do it all by computer. So here we were, the Philosophy and religion department. We'd have two or three guys sitting at a table, and if we had more than two people in line at any one time, we were up there with our hands in the air speaking in tongues. This was a miracle. But all of a sudden, if this January registration after this fellow had taught 225 students with the line to get into a philosophy class, ran all the way across the basketball arena, when outside the arena went up to the second floor, the parking structure. And I thought, we finally beat appreciate. But they only wanted this one guy. They didn't want a class from me. They only wanted it from this guy. So he was there and I said, Hey, Dewey, come over here. I said, Because I'm no fool. I said, Dewey, what kind of grades did you give the first semester? And get this? He said, Nash. I have a confession to make. I had one guy first semester who never showed up once and I had to give him ab0o man. He gave everybody else and a everybody else and a. Whenever I went on the golf course and played with a student, he'd. You always talk about this professor? He said, You know, I never learned a thing, but I got an A. I mean, my goodness, if he got all 125 hours, everybody in that school would have been a valedictorian. My goodness. Professional educationists friends. They are without question. Well, there may be some competition, but they are the most unqualified, uneducated people in the educational field.

 

[00:31:30] The departments and colleges of education in this country are a major reason for the incompetence of so many teachers. I ought to cry at this. Because even if you have a good person with qualifications, the schools will ruin them. Not only do the people who run these centers control what future teachers are taught. These same people will help set the qualifications that anyone desiring to teach must meet. Not surprisingly, these qualifications include an indefensible high number of courses taught by educationists. When my daughter decided that she might spend the rest of her life as a teacher. She wrote back to this university where I taught, but one that I'm refusing to name today. Now, she already had a B.A. degree, and then she had a master of arts degree from Southwestern Baptist Seminary. That's a graduate degree. Master of Arts and Religion. So she said, How many years would it take me if I came back to your university to get state certification? They said, three years. Three years. She had six and a half years of education in fine schools, not professional education. So she said, No thank you, or something stronger than that. And Liberty University, let me give Liberty a plug here. Liberty had a master of arts in education. The people who were already teaching school, it could complete in three summers. So my daughter went to Liberty for three straight summers. And not only did she get her master of Education degree, but she got state certification in the state of Virginia, which you can then transfer. So she's now got state certification in the state of Florida, and she didn't have to go back for three Mickey Mouse years. Reginald, Demerol says, quote, Empty credentials are all that any school or Department of Education in any university in the United States gives to its graduates.

 

[00:33:38] The education field is devoid of intellectual content, has no body of knowledge of its own, and acts as if bodies of knowledge do not exist in other university departments. That's the truth. You never saw so much arrogant. Empty headedness in your life as you encounter in a school or Department of Education. Thomas Soul, a great black economist, calls the Schools and Departments of Education get this. The intellectual slums of American academia. Whew. I could never say anything that harsh. The controlling ideology in these centers of education is a philosophy of education that regards information and course content as unimportant. The neglect of information and academic content is ruining the futures for millions of youngsters who end up culturally and functionally illiterate. Point three. And I got to say it sooner or later, indifferent. Now what now? And should go after this? Indifferent parents? Yeah. Parents who tolerate this stuff, who don't pay attention. Who don't find out why public schools are such a disaster. They are guilty in this matter of their own children's lack of education. Indifferent parents, and there's no need to say any more about that. Next, the teacher. Let's see. I need another now. Here. The teacher. What? Unions. The teacher. Unions. Now there are two of them. There's one called the AFC. We can forget that. It's largely irrelevant. It's particularly small. The big teachers union is the NEA. The NEA, the National Education Association. Have you ever seen their ads? I haven't seen an ad recently. I guess they do this about election time because electing liberal presidents and congresspeople as their big is their only calling in life. It's certainly not they're certainly not interested in excellence in education. You will see some handsome, delightful. Literate teacher. Actually, she's an actress.

 

[00:36:05] She went to acting school. And it brings tears to your eyes because this actress you can understand loves children so much. Why are they such bad teachers? Well, let me tell you, the every year. See, you can hardly be a teacher anywhere in a government school without belonging to a teacher's union. Most likely the NEA. The NEA collects an astounding pile of cash through dues. Oftentimes, that's a percentage of their income. And seven or eight years ago, the NEA was collecting in dues alone about $400 million a year, and that money went to bribe politicians. The NEA is the largest union in the world with more than 2 million members. I don't have statistics on how many of those 2 million members are functionally and culturally literate. I don't have that information. The hunt for 100 million it receives from dues each year make it an enormously powerful organization. It uses its clout and financial muscle to elect politicians who support its causes. The largest gift to Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign. $400,000 came from the NEA. This money, a lot of people don't know this. This was more than enough to cause Clinton to switch from a 1991 supporter of school choice to a 1992 enemy of family choice. 10% of the delegates to the Democratic National Convention are members of the NEA. I think that percentage has climbed in recent years. It carries on an aggressive lobbying campaign. In 1993, for example, California teachers spent $16 million to defeat a voucher system that would have made it possible for millions of California families to send their children to private schools. The NEA ceased to be a professional association long ago. The NEA does not really represent the rank and file teachers that make up its membership.

 

[00:38:17] I've met lots of people who are members of the NEA because they have to be. But they personally detest the union and what the union stands for. Any opposition to school choice results from the union's self-interest. Smaller competitive schools would put an end to the large bargaining blocs that centralized school administration makes possible with decentralization that would come from making education a part of a market system. With decentralization experimentation cum varying terms and conditions of employment that are not amenable to the kinds of control that the NEA demands. Now, state monopoly is our next point. State monopoly. Let's come right out and say it. One of the major reasons for the lack of any competent education in America's government schools is statism. If you want to know why statism doesn't work. Look at America's schools. Let's put it another way. Statist monopoly control over American schools amounts to educational socialism. Same thing. There is no accountability. It's the system. That counts. There is no excellence in that system. The existence of this educational monopoly conflicts with other areas of American life where people have a wide range of choices available to them. You know, one of Ronald Reagan's big mistakes was he vowed he would get rid of the Department of Education. He did not. And then George Bush senior came along and he didn't do it. And, of course, Bill Clinton wouldn't do it. He's raking in the dough. And we're to the point now where no Republican has the integrity to really stand up to these people. What we need I know we have a lot of crises in the country, the war on terrorism and everything else. But, my goodness, if the right people would go to work and help the American families of this country understand where the real blame for educational failure lies, I believe we could have a revolution here.

 

[00:40:38] State monopoly. Public school finances. Oh. Number six. Public school finances. Now, I'm going to give you some numbers that you won't believe are true, but they're even worse today than they were five or six years ago. Take the 20 years, for example, between 1972 and 1992, actual enrollment in American public schools in that 20 year period declined by 7%. By the end of that 20 year period, we had 7% fewer kids in our public schools than we had 20 years before. But during those 20 years, public school spending in the United States, four 7% fewer students increased by 400%. And yet, what do we hear every election year? We don't have enough money. Give us more money. We have given them the money and the standards continued to decline 400%. However, the number of public school teachers jumped dramatically from 1.4 million in 1960 to 2.4 million in 1991. We got 7% fewer students. We got a million more teaching between 1960 and 1991. Teacher salaries, adjusted for inflation, increased 45%. In 1991, The average school teacher's salary that would be a nationwide was $35,000. 11 years later, I see a police position advertised on the local cable TV for Oviedo, Florida. $29,000 for a policeman. Now, I know Florida teachers are near the bottom of that wrong, but even so. Now let's focus on the Los Angeles Unified School District. Isn't that sound good? Their budget. In Los Angeles, Unified School District was about $4 billion a year. 4 billion. Do you know how much of that budget actually supported teacher salaries, textbooks and supplies? One third. When you look at any public school budget in the big cities, actually today, it's down around 25%. Where is the other 75% going? Bureaucracy. Yeah. Bureaucracy.

 

[00:43:20] I did some research on the two major school system in the city of New York. The big one, of course, is the New York City public school system. The second largest system, educational system in New York City. Any idea what it is? The Catholic Church. Now you've got literally hundreds and hundreds of bureaucrats in the public schools of New York City pulling down salaries well over $100,000 a year. If you call the central headquarters of the Roman Catholic school system in New York City. And you ask how many administrators they have. The secretary will say, Well, let me see their sister, Veronica. These are the administrators of the Roman Catholic schools. Probably a hundred thousand kids. There's Sister Veronica. There's Father O'Banion. He's got to be Irish, usually. And there's Monsignor. Anyway. How can you run a school system with four administrators? Just don't be a public institution. That's how. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Only about 25% of the school budget actually goes to pay for such educational expenses as teachers salaries, textbooks and furniture. I never see any percentages for Orange County or Seminole County. The remaining 75% go to pay for administration costs. Hmm. Thank you for listening to this lecture. Brought to you by biblical training, dawg. Your prayers and financial support enable us to provide a biblical and theological education that all people around the world can access. Blessings. As you continue to study and live out your faith and as you grow in your relationship with the Lord.