The rise of home schooling coincides with the general breakdown in the public school system. It began when LBJ, our first "education president," signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, with funding of $1.65 billion. The congressional sponsor predicted, ironically, that the bill would reduce "the cost of crime, delinquency, unemployment, and welfare."
America's worry over a general moral erosion in politics and society has coincided with ever-more draconian federal control over education. What's often overlooked is that government schooling itself may be the crux of the problem. In particular, the compulsory attendance laws that exist in every state, and which are reinforced by federal programs, guarantee a captive audience for political indoctrination.
People who advocate tax-funded school vouchers for private schools frequently hail the G.I. Bill of Rights education vouchers for World War II veterans as a model. In truth, the G.I. Bill was a budget-busting middle-class entitlement scheme that had destructive effects on higher education, and set the stage for virtually all our current educational problems.
In the famed 1995 budget battles between the White House and the Congress, Bill Clinton told a whopper that put him on the rhetorical offensive. He said that Congress's proposed cuts in a particular program amounted to "raising taxes on the poor."
Now in its seventh year, the school voucher experiment in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is held up as a model for the nation. But the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program has found itself fighting its own track record as much as the city's public school establishment. The early cascade of hurrahs has slowed in recent days. This is a thankful development, given the sense of racial entitlement that drives this program and other symptoms of voucher fever.
In a state-funded education system, bad ideas live longer than they would in a free market. That's the best explanation for the staying power of the two opposing errors of our time: nihilism and pseudo-omniscience in the social sciences.
Government bureaucrats look out for their own kind. Entrepreneur John Shanahan, the man behind "Hooked on Phonics," found that out the hard way when he developed a program that taught his son how to read after the California public schools could not.
The joy erupting in Howard University's student union was palpably motivated; O.J. Simpson would walk. "As the verdict was read, the place erupted into screaming and jumping. You couldn't hear," one observer put it. To the students, a falsely accused black man was able to get justice—in racist America, no less.
Cheers to the governors of Alabama and Virginia for sending back millions of dollars earmarked for the "Goals 2000" program slated to be imposed on their states' schools. After decades of federal attacks on local control, they have responded to voter demands that school centralization be halted.
We're no fans of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and now they know it. After Hurricane Opal caused substantial damage here in Auburn, Lew Rockwell wrote a piece for the Los Angeles Times arguing that we'd be better off without post-disaster federal aid. Why should California taxpayers be penalized for our misfortune? he asked. He also had choice words for FEMA bureaucrats who use natural disasters to enhance federal control.
So the phone rang, and it was Morry Goodman of FEMA.
