Hear. Hear. Oregon is another place where tax reformist ideologues have held hostage public schools forcing their dictatorial obsession with an primal efficiency principle onto the not-always efficient system we call public education. It makes it difficult to give these ideologues credit when they have worthy ideas because they seem incapable of conversion, rather relying on initiatives and monies from wealthy private individuals to fund campaigns that the public would not support in a grass roots way, dominating the media presentation and sometimes outright fraud at slipping measures onto the ballot, exploiting the apathy of the voting public to pass legislation that benefits a few while the majority does not vote. Or, as Frank Hample aptly put it, the sheeple have spoken. There will always be dissent about the private vs public function of government, just as we will forever debate Nature vs Nurture, and debate is good because it should keep the taxpayers eyes on those who practice government in their name; however, there is such an obsession with inflexible principles that collides with changing demographics and technological/societal change that the students are not well served, and neither is the public paying for it or society in the long run. Is there a good balance between private and public enterprise in public education anywhere? Sweden? Switzerland? Germany? Karen
In Canada, we now have a number of provincial governments that operate from a neo-liberal perspective, believing, it would seem without much foundation, that private enterprise is "good" and public enterprise is "bad". While far from being as harmful as Pol Pot's, their idealism has led to a serious underfunding of essential services such as, in one very flagrant case, water testing, and in many perhaps less flagrant cases, public education. The right wing Government of Ontario, as part of its privatization program, has recently tried to let the market set the price of electricity. That in itself is not a bad idea, but to do it without a lot of pre-planning and the assurance of sufficient generating capacity spelled disaster for consumers. The result: because it is heading toward an election, the government backed way off and capped rates at a level far below costs. I guess its a case of not sticking to one's neo-lib convictions. Canada's Royal Commission on Health Services has now published its report. In it, the Commissioner, Roy Romanow, stated that he found absolutely no evidence that the provision of private health care is more efficient than public provision. Of course, one has to appreciate that Mr. Romanow, as a former left-leaning provincial premier, may have a few ideals himself. As Keynes pointed out, we are all the slaves of some defunct economist - Adam Smith, Henry George, even Keynes. Regards, Ed P.S.: My daughter attends a very good public high school here in Ottawa. She left for school about an hour ago and just walked back through our door. Why did she come home? Because her morning classes were cancelled - the teachers were ill. Why, as was the practice, were they not replaced by substitutes? Because there no longer is money for that kind of expenditure in the system. P.P.S.: Ottawa has a repository that has supplied the public system with books, videotapes, and other things needed to teach kids. The idea was that to have a single repository from which all schools could draw was better and more efficient than making each school make special purchases. The repository has now been closed to save money. P.P.P.S: A newspaper item reported that public school teachers are paying for supplies out of their own salaries, spending as much as $2,000 in some cases. P.P.P.P.S: I may whining, but I resent the whittling away of good publicly operated systems because those in power are enslaved to defunct economists.
