These heartbreaking statistics are not the symptoms of a system famished for funding as the most prominent arguments against this thesis suggests. Thirty thousand dollars is almost enough to, “cover the costs of Harvard’s yearly undergraduate tuition or [to] send [one’s] child to the prestigious Sidwell Friends School” attended by President Obama’s children as Heritage Foundation Scholar Rachel Sheffield notes. However, in Washington D.C. $30,000 is barely enough to indict a child into a school with some of the lowest graduation rates and achievement rates in the country, as demonstrated in the preceding paragraphs. Cramming more funding down the bloated throats of America’s failing public schools will do nothing to fix the systemic problems with education. The problem is not that these schools need more support, the problem is that they have been supported far too much.
Luckily, the free market is finding ways to ameliorate the problems created by the government. Today, there are already private alternatives that have sprouted up as an alternative to traditional public education. While it is easy to scoff at online education, upon examination of their curriculum they are beyond a veritable substitute. Wikipedia, for example, easily contains all the information one could learn in grade school.
Groups like the Kahn Academy offer a free online university that hosts tens of thousands of videos and lectures that cover everything in K-12 education, to music lessons, to coding lessons. These online schools are often free to anyone, at anytime, and allow the student to engage their material at their own pace, in their preferred way. These schools not only encompass all the knowledge that could be gained through conventional public education, but they expand and offer information of an eclectic spread of skills that are rarely seen in public schools, such as computer programming, animation, video production, and musical education.
It is harrowing to consider that public education sprouts from the same group that bring us the Department of Motor Vehicles. With such a sordid lineage to boast, it is surprising there is not more animosity towards the public education system today. Luckily however, motivated entrepreneurs are finding ways around government incompetence to educate people in new, more efficient, and cheaper ways.
Follow the author, Patrick Kane, on facebook at www.facebook.com/heroinpuppies or on twitter @patvkane
