Don Ewing: Too many children leaving school without skills needed for success

To The Daily Sun,

Most Americans feel obligated to prepare each younger American generation to prosper and to carry on America’s founding principle, “that all men are created equal...endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights...Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”. Helping to fulfill that obligation is the primary purpose of our public education system.

Sadly, our public education system fails in this responsibility despite over 50 years of taxpayers responding to the school systems’ experts’ demands. Taxpayers provide higher wages, better benefits, smaller class sizes, increased special education funding, new technology, new facilities, additional administrators, etc. Yet, proving that the experts’ funding demands don’t solve our education problems, far too many children leave public schools without the basic skills needed for future success.

Our nation’s public education system compares poorly versus other nations’ public education systems. Various studies rank our education system as 22nd: tinyurl.com/2p84htxh, 13th: tinyurl.com/5n7bvazk, 20th: tinyurl.com/423a698m. I found one study, tinyurl.com/mzav2ava, that ranked us first, but it acknowledged that our math and science achievements ranked 38th and 24th respectively. MSN reports that a Gallop survey found that 20% of Americans believe the sun revolves around the earth.

The United States has only about 4% of the world’s population. American children need to be prepared to successfully compete against very bright, hardworking, and educated people worldwide.

During the pandemic many parents were shocked at the content and teaching their children receive. Our students are taught self-esteem, protesting, Marxism (envy and laziness), White Supremacy, Black Lives Matter, and to question their own gender, but too many can’t read, think, or make change for a dollar.

In desperation many parents home school, hire tutors, or pay for alternative schools in addition to paying their public school taxes.

Like most monopolies our public school system fails because it lacks incentives to improve. Senior citizens will remember how breaking up the high cost, limited option telephone monopoly of our childhoods brought the competition which provides today’s inexpensive and feature-rich telephones.

We don’t fund public schools just to provide jobs and sports teams; our obligation is to prepare students. We need freedom in education. Parents should be able to direct taxpayer-provided education funds to best benefit their children. This will create a revolution in education, improving public schools, incentivizing new schools and methods, and competition to provide the best possible educational results for each child.

As a result our students will be prepared to compete and prosper against world-wide competition. Our country will continue demonstrating to the world what can be achieved when a society is dedicated to our founding principles of equality before the law, and “life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” for all.

Don Ewing

Meredith