Why Government Schools Get Worse

All organizations, like all organisms, are engaged in an existential struggle for survival. Schools are no different. However, there is a notable difference in the failure of private vs government organizations, and that applies to schools as well.

Schools are difficult to run well, and even more difficult to fix, but it can be done. The movie 'Stand and Deliver' about high school math teacher Jaime Escalante is a true story. It's a good movie, but misses the important role of the principal in turning the school around. Escalante says this in his introduction to Henry Gradillas's book about the school turnaround, 'Standing and Delivering'.

Escalante and Gradillas had to fight against the students, parents, other teachers, school district, school board, gangs, the state education department, and others. To help these kids go from a horrible school to a good school they had almost everyone work against them. And they still did it. They succeeded. But, when Gradillas left, within a few years the school was back to being bad. Gradillas made a career out of turning government schools around. Yet, without that highly capable changemaker constantly engaged in the struggle, the system turns the government schools back into bad organizations. In the end it's an unwinnable struggle.

The movie 'Lean on Me' starring Morgan Freeman is another true story about a principal, Joe Clark, turning around a failing government school. Again, Clark had to fight against students, teachers, gangs, drug dealers, parents, the school board, the department of education, and others. Everyone was against him. He even had to break laws, such as chaining the school doors, to make things work because they were so bad. Pinky Miller was a student and later wrote a book, 'Life After Lean on Me', about how Joe Clark helped to change her life for the better, because her life was bad. Yet, when Joe Clark left the school things went back to being bad within a few years. You can fight the system, and even win a few battles, but you can't win the war.

This is true outside of the United States too. A principal in Australia, Peter Hutton, wrote a book about turning around a failing government school there, 'Turning Around a Troubled School'. Notice that in all three of these cases the government only allowed the necessary changes because the schools were so bad that they were getting political pressure to do something, so they were desperate, and even then they resisted the changes to improve the schools. Hutton even lied about attendance numbers early on so the government didn't shut the school down, so that he could have the chance to fix the school. Later he left government schools and went on to start a private school.

Why is it that the government schools seem to be in a continual state of failure, and no matter how much money and political attention is put on them they continue to fail and even get worse? It's part of the nature of the organization.

In 'Why Government Is the Problem' Milton Friedman states: "If a private enterprise is a failure, it closes down - unless it can get a government subsidy to keep it going; if a government enterprise fails, it is expanded." There are of course some people with bad intentions, and as the organization gains more power and money it attracts more people with bad intentions, but for the most part these government organizations are started and expanded with good intentions. An example of the saying, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." Friedman puts it, "People who intend to serve only the public interest are led by an invisible hand to serve private interests which was no part of their intention." This is the corruption that we see in these organizations.

Friedman also notes how when a government organization is failing the messaging around its purpose changes so that it can continue to exist under a new idea that can be sold to the public: "The general rule is that government undertakes an activity that seems desirable at the time. Once the activity begins, whether it proves desirable or not, people in both the government and the private sector acquire a vested interest in it. If the initial reason for undertaking the activity disappears, they have a strong incentive to find another justification for its continued existence."

Essentially, if a private school is failing it goes broke and is shut down, and by failing I mean not satisfying the parents of the students who are the paying customers of the school. A private school must answer to its customers, with parents and students being the deciding stakeholders. If a government school is failing it's given more money, taken from tax payers through taxes or inflation, to try to fix the problem. By failing, in this case, I mean not being politically supported in elections of politicians, because that's the driver of change in government. The primary stakeholders that make the decisions are no longer parents and students, they are at the bottom of the list, the decision makers are politicians at the local, state, and federal level. That's why teachers' unions are political lobbies controlled by a political party. Parents and students become groups to be manipulated and controlled by those who make the decisions and have the power.

The division is clear, in private schools failure is punished, in government schools failure is rewarded. I've seen failing government schools, the worst of the worst in the state of Michigan, given tens of millions of dollars from the state to pay previous debt which had included a large amount of fraud. This is how government and politics works. In private enterprise success is rewarded, in government enterprise failure is rewarded. The good is sacrificed to the bad through the medium of government expense.

How to fix this seems obvious, you just have to reward success and punish failure in government schools. This is a reasonable theory, but wrong in practice. What you get instead is a large amount of fraud and cheating. The schools that are failing are desperate with little to lose, so they lie about their enrollment, their attendance, their grades, their number of employees (a common way to steal money in the government is to pay employees that don't exist), their test scores, they lie about everything. Teachers and administrators will actually help students cheat on tests to get better scores. All of the government schools in Atlanta, Georgia do this. The schools that are succeeding also cheat and lie to continue being in the lead, and to compete with the other schools that are already lying and cheating.

Plus, the politicians who are in charge get political pressure because they are taking from the needy and giving to the successful, which doesn't seem fair. So, they increase funding to the failing schools, but leave in rewards for the succeeding schools. Now you still have a large amount of cheating, lying, and fraud because of the incentives and the precedent of doing it, along with draining more funds through taxes or inflation (the result of government spending increasing the money supply). Now you have a system that rewards success and failure, and it's easier to fail.

Fraud, lying, and cheating happen in private companies too, it's just harder to do, and there are actual negative consequences, whereas fraud, lying, and cheating in government are rarely held accountable and often the keys to success in politics. If a private school is paying fake employees on the payroll, then the owner is losing money to an employee of that organization, and most likely they will be discovered at some point and brought up on criminal charges, along with being sued in civil court, and fired. If the company doesn't catch them then the company will probably go broke at some point and cease to exist. In a government school, even if they're caught, maybe someone will resign, and the next person probably continues the same thing. The politicians get a great opportunity to campaign on fixing the schools, and everyone applauds.

If a private school is lying to parents about the students' grades, then when the parents find out they will probably pull their kids out of the school, possibly sue the school, and the school has a good chance of going broke and no longer existing. In a government school, maybe someone resigns (maybe a small scapegoat gets in legal trouble), and the next person probably continues the same thing. The politicians get a great opportunity to campaign on fixing the schools, and everyone applauds them.

The many billions of dollars of fraud in US daycares is a good example of this. In a real private daycare it would be hard to commit fraud. If a parent pays you to watch their kid and you don't watch the kid, you're not going to have that customer for long. In a government daycare, which is what many daycares are even though they appear to be private because the US is largely a socialist or fascist or crony capitalist economy where the government either taxes or inflates money to give directly to organizations so that the voting public is fooled into thinking these organizations aren't government programs, the government can easily send a lot of money to daycares with no kids because it's better for all of the stakeholders involved, since none of the stakeholders are parents or children. The so-called owners of the government daycares take the money and use some of it themselves, they donate some of it back to the politicians so the politicians will keep sending them money, and they send some to various terrorist organizations in and out of the United States so that more US police and soldiers can be killed through funding by the US government itself, just indirectly. It benefits everyone other than honest Americans, which is who the system steals from and kills, which are both forms of human sacrifice. This is how government and politics works. These are the organizations that people trust their kids with.

So, what to do? The government schools aren't going to get better. That's a lost cause because the US government is too corrupt to be fixed. It would be theoretically easy. All you would have to do is say there are local schools only supported through local taxes with payer discretion and controlled by locally elected school boards. This is how the system looks now as a way to fool the public. If schools were actually locally controlled you would end up with a wide variety of schools. Some would be classical, some would be Montessori, some would be technical or trade schools, some would focus on sports, some would be college preparation, some would be religious, some would be business schools, it would be all over the place. If you allowed taxpayers to choose which school their money went to, some schools would immediately go bankrupt.

There would be so much political backlash against all of this that all politicians would be able to campaign on fixing the schools by the government taking over again at a higher level and restoring order. It will never happen, the government will never give up control of the schools, because the minds of children are an important government resource to manage and control. Effort to fix government schools is wasted effort.

That leaves one real option, creating parallel structures. These are organizations that exist alongside and outside of the government organization. These can be large, like private schools, some of which are only one school, and some of which are large organizations with many schools. Some are religious, some are not. Parallel structures can be medium size and community oriented, which you see with micro-schools, homeschool pods, and learning cooperatives. Parallel structures can be small and personal, such as private tutors, homeschooling, and apprenticeships. The responsibility is on the parents and students to choose a solution that works for their goals, in these organizations that succeed or fail based on results.

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