School Choice is Ideal

Teachers are among the hardest- working people for the lowest possible pay. My late father was a teacher, my sister is a teacher, my mom is a retired teacher, and I have taught both Sunday school and youth nights. My mom used to joke that once she became a teacher, every pen she grabbed was a red pen. It is by no means an easy profession. If you think it’s easy, let me see you give up just about all of your free time to kids who may either resent you or forget you in a few years. This is especially true if you live in a bigger city.

Now, why does the title say that school choice is ideal when I have such a high respect for teachers? Simply put, it polices the bad teachers and helps the honest teachers. Because teachers are considered state employees, it is difficult to fire a bad teacher. Because I am pressed for space, I am going to just say that there are pages upon pages of steps in a flow chart to fire a teacher.

Imagine if you ran a chocolate shop, and you found out that one of your employees was giving away product to his friends. What would be the first thing that you would do? You would, of course, fire him. However, if said chocolate shop worked like the school system, you would not only have to prove and document that this theft was taking place, but you would also have to give this employee a chance to improve and not do it again. In this example, the employee promises never again to give chocolate away to his friends, but then starts eating some of the product. You then would have to go through the same series of steps. Then, after all of those steps, he promises never to eat the product again. Some time later, he starts giving the product away. The chocolate shop owner would then have to prove everything all over again.

This is what it is like for a principal or other administrator to fire bad teachers with seniority. That is why teachers who do not have seniority are fired first. There is nothing that can be done to stop this, as it is decided on by unions, and that is another topic for another article.

Alternatively, there is school choice, and vouchers are now available in the Lone Star State. This means that money follows the student and not the district. This stops the monopoly that the present system represents. In every other monopoly in the country, especially government monopolies, value drops and prices rise.

Imagine two butchers who are right next to each other. If one was not very good and had outrageous prices, but the other had good, clean cuts at affordable prices, which would you go to? Now, imagine that the government took your tax dollars and gave them to the first butcher. You are paying for that meat over there and so you may as well take it. Then all of a sudden, you were allowed to keep that money and buy from whichever butcher you wanted. The first butcher would have to improve or go out of business.

The same is true for public versus private schools. If all teachers are good and do their jobs, no school or teacher has anything to worry about, as they will be funded. Bad schools will lose money.

The voucher system also allows parents more control over what their kids are taught. This allows parents to opt out of things that they wholeheartedly disagree with. After all, they are not the teacher’s kids. They are your kids.