Immediately upon entering the classroom, I knew something was terribly wrong.
My Lifetime of Experience with Government Schools
By: George Noga – June 12, 2022
Readers have requested that I share some personal stories that have shaped my beliefs. Following is my story of a lifetime of experience with government schools.
I still vividly recall my third-grade experience in 1952 after we had moved to a town in Georgia. My mother enrolled me in the assigned government school and accompanied me to my assigned classroom where I was to remain. Although I was only 9 years old, I knew immediately something was terribly wrong. The scene that greeted us was straight from the movie Deliverance, not uncoincidentally filmed nearby. My mother, equally horrified, enrolled me in parochial school, even though our family couldn’t afford the cost. St. Theresa’s proved to be the polar opposite of the pathologically dysfunctional public school. This was a transcendental moment in my young life.
I attended either parochial schools or ones on military bases until ninth grade when I was relegated to government schools in our new home in Central Florida. This time there was to be no escape. These schools were educational cesspools; any learning that took place was purely coincidental. The teachers harbored delusions of adequacy. Most everyone understood these schools were educational wastelands, but no one cared.
Government school failure is endemic and incapable of reform.
It immediately became apparent what the priority was, in one word: football. Not that many decades ago, there were 150,000 school districts in the US; today that number is 15,000. Smaller schools and districts are much better for learning and parental control. So, why have 135,000 school districts disappeared? The answer, again in one word: football. Larger schools have a greater chance of having bigger and faster players.
The top priority of the high school I attended was to build its own football stadium. The entire community pitched in with fundraisers, building materials and labor. People know how to build a football field but not how to fix a badly broken school. Football has scores published each week in the newspaper, but no such thing exists for learning.
My next experience with government schools was in 1967 during a six-month hiatus between graduate school and active duty in the army. Ostensibly, I taught junior high math, but maintaining discipline required full time effort; teaching was incidental. The administration cared only about avoiding complaints from parents. I was told not to fail anyone. Ironically, the school was highly regarded; but it really was dysfunctional. It failed everyone: students, teachers, parents and the community. This was a dismal experience, and it has only gotten worse – much worse – in the ensuing 55 years.
Fast forward many years. We now live in the Florida county with the highest per capita income and which reputedly has the best schools in the state. Moreover, we reside in the best part of that county with reputedly the best government schools in that county. Despite living in an area with the best public schools in the entire state of 20 million people, the schools were only borderline adequate. We sent our children there only for a few years of elementary school; the junior high and high schools were unacceptable.
Fast forward to 1994 when I started the first school voucher effort in Florida. The program I started and ran for its first ten years, now called Step Up For Students, today funds private school scholarships for 103,000 children from low-income families at a cost of $700 million. During the time I ran this program, I heard countless stories from grateful parents of our scholarship recipients about the horrors they experienced in government schools and how well their children now were doing in their new schools.
Read my post of 7/25/21 at www.mllg.us for a history of school choice in Florida.
The USA is a big country and there still are some good public schools. One such place is our summer home in NW Montana where schools are highly regarded and reinforce, rather than contradict, parental values. A family we know recently moved there from Florida and is ecstatic about their children’s public schools. There are no closures, masks or vaccine mandates. When school is out, children are on their own. Kids proudly bring to class photos of game they bagged during hunting season. Some, as young as 8, participate in youth bull riding. PTAs raffle AK-47s to raise money.
The lesson of my lifetime of experience with government schools as a student, teacher, parent and school choice advocate is that they are jobs programs for adults; children are afterthoughts. However bad you may believe government schools are, the reality is much worse. And it is not just about education; it is about values, safety and culture.
As with any government program, school failure is endemic and incapable of reform. The only solution is universal school choice; the money must follow the student thereby empowering families to be free to choose. Absolutely nothing else will work. There is no force on earth more powerful than parents armed with a school voucher!
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Next – We continue with school choice and its role in the upcoming election.
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More Liberty Less Government – mllg@cfl.rr.com – www.mllg.us
