Being a New Yorker, I couldn’t help but notice in recent news about the recent desire of our governor to go up and dance “The Bernie” and just perform what any leftist considering a presidential run would do to promise people free stuff. I could write an article saying why free college is bad, but well, I already kind of have and so has every other libertarian who writes stuff at 8 am when bored: it costs too much, which inflates the value of a degree; the funds don’t actually go to the real poor.
All of that we’ve heard before, and if anyone is going onto a website called BeingLibertarian.com, there’s a 120% chance they agree with me on that stance already. What I want to discuss, however, is something I believe the government should be involved in, which is the K-12 system and financing it. In K-12, I’ll just make the valid point of asking all of these hardcore leftists wanting to toss hundreds of billions into free college can’t just fix the already free high school system?
First off, let’s just go into why the left seems to be completely ignoring high school as a whole. The reason falls into three parts. The first being actually fixing high schools in America to make people spend four years of their life actually doing something of value from a government service is actually a hard thing to achieve. The second being it just isn’t a sexy promise at all. When someone such as Bernie Sanders promises to go out and make college free it just rallies his fans to stop playing beer pong and go “I don’t have to pay to do this!” The third and final reason is that having to do anything to involving pissing off the teachers unions is like a Republican pissing off Big Oil: it just won’t happen. From that, the left just very simply won’t touch high schools.
The next part is why the focus should be on high schools. The simplest reason is it is infrastructure already there (for the most part). The schools are already built, the students are already there. Everything is already 100% in place where it’s culture for people from every demographic to ages 14-18 go to this place called high school, have the standard Glee experience and grow up. It’s something most people never expect to pay for and it’s already cemented as this free thing in America. That’s the most basic pitch on why this is the thing the left should work to fix.
On the topic of process of high schools, there seems to be two schools of thought on the subject. The first is high school is just this conventional ground where people get good grades learning the very bare basics of a subject and that models them for college. The second step is that high school can be partnered with trade schools that prepare people for the real world in nursing, plumbing and more blue-collar fields. Both of these models are liked, but I don’t particularly care for either one. The first model is basically just sending the students permission to go get a bill. The second model is training people for careers which won’t exist in two decades. Plumbers won’t exist, electricians won’t exist, chefs won’t exist…these jobs are dead. What needs to hold is an emphasis on reforming schools for white-collar career training and that comes from a mix of vouchers and actual reforms to academics.
With the voucher model, it’s something pretty set with libertarians. People, instead of getting money sent to them in the form of schools, just get the flat check to spend on education. A regulatory structure is in place as to hos on how they can spend that money and after that incentives to save and use it well. In this model, we have an opening for a new thing in education called competition and corporations. A company can come in and now offer a better product at a better price and markets will adjust to that in different regions and areas. This method has made Chile with a segregated voucher model still better than Latin America and in Indiana, the voucher program setup by that state’s former governor Mitch Daniels is used for a small percentage of students who have near universal satisfaction.
Yet this model still doesn’t explain how to make high school more valuable. At this point, I’d say it just comes down to standards set at a state or national level. We need a government agency to assess the actual market value of skills taught in the classroom, assess the real value of it in what that skill could get hourly and permit people to use voucher funds to learn skills in the blue- and white-collar fields based on that value. After that, we determine that to be considered a graduate, students must receive certificates in actual fields of market value and that will impact their real GPA. Programming, blue-collar fields, marketing & sales, graphic design, etc., very basic and clear things. And the entire reason this model can only come from vouchers is industry. If a state under a normal public school model said they want to have it so every student has access to a serious programming class, they’ll be stuck on HTML5 for beginners with a teacher who likely just learned it before getting the job. With the market and vouchers coming in, actual companies can move in and change the field.
The final thoughts I have on this simple article is just me holding the desire to say don’t let the left be lazy. There’s a serious reality high schools are not good enough in current form and competition doesn’t exist. When the effort is moved to see someone such as Bernie Sanders go out and talk about how they want to spend hundreds of billions for college to be free, begin to question what America already spends hundreds of billions on in the realm of growing up called 9-12th grade.
Charles Peralo
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