An Open Letter To Parents About Education!

Barack Obama may promise you the world, but he doesn’t have the Constitutional authority to give you anything! The Department of Education was put into place by Jimmy Carter to gain the undying support of the nation’s teachers and to funnel money to the unions scattered throughout the nation. Schools, their curriculum, and their pay scales are to be determined by the locales that they serve, not by dictates from the federal government. The tax base is what is going to determine the number of teachers that a district can afford, not some mandate from Washington D.C.  School districts are to be run by local school boards, consisting of mostly parents, with a teacher or a teacher’s supporter sprinkled in for good measure. The logic behind that is simple. Why would you allow union reps or teachers to dominate the very board that determines pay, working hours, class size, and benefits? That would be like appointing Al Capone as the Chairman of a bank.

Obama keeps saying that we need 100,000 more teachers! Who needs that many more teachers? Oh yeah, the teachers unions, so they can get more dues and in turn elect more Democrats, who in turn ask for more teachers, and on and on it goes. Taxpayers have invested over TWO TRILLION dollars in education since 1979, and what is there to show for that money? A 17th place showing in math and science compared to the rest of the world. The rest of the world does NOT spend what America spends per pupil yet gets a higher result for their money…Why? Maybe because they don’t have to deal with powerful unions that are more interested in furthering their agenda than teaching the children! It takes almost as long to get rid of a bad, tenured teacher as it does to carry out a death sentence in this country.

Teachers decide to go out on strike like they did in Chicago, when they are already among the highest-paid in the country, so what was their beef?  They should have all been suspended without pay for violating state law against striking. Don’t like the hours, or the work? Then go find another career. Good to excellent teachers should be recipients of bonus pay, but the unions refuse to allow that. Bad teachers should be weeded out as they not only hurt the students whose parents are paying to learn (property taxes), but the school system as a whole!

Preparing our children for the future is a very important task to be handed, but it is a local task, not a federal one. Our kids and their parents and guardians are being short-changed by a payola system that benefits no one but the unions themselves. The parents need to become involved, vigilant, and demanding when it comes to their children’s education. Abdicating parental responsibility to a bunch of bureaucrats in Washington D. C. is simply wasting good money that has much better application locally.

Obama’s rhetoric is nothing more than pandering to a certain group of supporters and does nothing to enhance the educational experience of our children.

Photo Credit: kjarrett (Creative Commons)