Stossel Right : Teachers Unions Wrong...and public school students continue to suffer

John Stossel get's it...and he's all over the miserable performance of our public schools and the teachers unions that are only interested in protecting themselves.

Perhaps the most fundamentally flawed idea is this all-too-common one: "Public schools were created to provide a 'public good': education for all, regardless of a family's ability to pay ... By contrast, under a voucher system that gives public dollars to completely unmonitored private schools, there is no such right to expect or demand accountability for student performance or how tax dollars are spent."

They don't get it. Competition brings accountability.

Private schools may be "unmonitored" by bureaucrats, but they face the most demanding kind of supervision our society provides: a market full of freely choosing individuals. Parents' desire for a good education for their children is a much more powerful check on schools than any politician's law or union rule. The people who want to control every young American's education like to talk about accountability, but what they want is to make schools accountable to anointed bureaucrats who think they know what's best for all of us. They evade real accountability -- the kind of accountability where if a student or parent realizes a school isn't doing its job, he can find another one.

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Parents' desire for a good education
for their children is a much
more powerful check on schools than
any politician's law or union rule.

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I could go on; there are plenty of myths. But the most important point to remember is quite simple: If public schools are good, they have nothing to fear from school choice. Students and parents will choose them.

Crazy idea... competition creates accountability.

Crazy idea...performance-based pay.

Crazy idea...allowing mothers to be pro-choice

Yup, Stossel's got it right.

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