Fitzsimon File

The folks who start each morning pledging philosophical allegiance to the holy free market must be in a panic these days. There is close to a consensus in Washington that the financial markets need more regulation and oversight from the federal government.

Even Governor Sarah Palin, the new darling of the market fundamentalists, talked about it in her recent debate with Senator Joe Biden.

The latest Elon University Poll finds that 71 percent of North Carolinians want the federal government to cap how much executives at financial companies can earn. Seventy-three percent want increased regulation of banks and Wall Street firms.

Last months poll found that the majority of people in the state would rather have a government-run, taxpayer financed health system than the one we have now. The people have figured it out.

Maybe most disturbing to the anti-government crowd, the Elon Poll also finds that more people oppose education vouchers for private and religious schools than support them. That comes despite years of misleading studies and carefully crafted pejorative rhetoric about public schools from right wing avenue.

They have tried everything to dismantle public education and turn over children's futures to the vagaries of the profit-obsessed market. They call public schools a monopoly and government-run education.

They blame everything on the "teacher's union" or rail against "tunnel vision and the labor union" mentality. They question the motives of people who work in public education and oppose virtually every bond issue to build new schools or renovate old ones.  They make it harder for public schools to improve and then complain when they don't.

They commission faux research from national think tanks that distort the data or cherry pick test results to try to convince us that it's better for every parent to care only about their individual child's education, not the school that serves the whole community, including the children whose parents who work two jobs and can't serve lunch to the teachers and chip in to buy new computers for the lab.

One recent study touts the privatization of schools in Sweden, where the government provides free health care for every citizen and free day care for every child. Taxes pay for services.

There are very few poor children or poor families in Sweden, making any comparison of how students do in school irrelevant as long as poverty exists in the United State and is a powerful predictor of student performance.

Closer to home, the much-ballyhooed voucher program in Milwaukee that began in the early 1990s has fallen well short of expectations resulting in "bad schools and little change" according to a report last year from a conservative group that strongly supports the program.

Try as they might, the market zealots have not been able to convince most people we should treat the education of our children like potato chips or every other item for sale on the free market where there are winners and losers.

People don't want schools like that. They want every child in the neighborhood to get a good education, not just the ones with parents who are heavily involved in their son or daughter's school.

Public education in North Carolina has plenty of problems and we need to solve them together, as a community, for all the kids. 

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 7th, 2008 at 5:39 pm and is filed under Fitzsimon File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.