If you read my blog you know I don't have a very high opinion of private school education. Basically private schools are run like a saw mill. When they turn out a high quality product, it is because they have controlled their raw material. Anything that is not going to make good lumber is turned away at the door or cast aside when the flaws become evident.

If you want to know what is going on in our country, you should study what research is announced by this administration on Friday afternoons. Why then? Because the commercial news goes on break on Friday afternoons. They don't cover those stories and the regular news is down on Saturday and Sunday. On Monday, they may pick up some of that Friday stuff, mixed in with weekend events, or . . . they may just skip over it because it's old news.

On last Friday afternoon the administration "put out the trash" which included an educaiton study that shows that private schools are not doing quite as good a job as public schools in every area except 8th grade reading, where they did better. In math they were significantly behind.
John Tierney of the New York Times was on the attack today and his vitriole even carried down here in the South on the AJC's editorial pages. What is his complaint? Since he can't refute the evidence, he calls the evidence "spin." He also attacks the "unions" and those evil "teachers" for their role in spinning. Their crime is that they called attention to the Friday afternoon trash.

How does Tierney spin it? Unable to refute the facts, he changes the subject. Well, he says it costs twice as much for the public schools to do the same job. Hmmm let's see. We'll pay teachers less, let them be less qualified, not require the schools to own build or maintain their buildings, we'll control the raw material, we'll not require the testing that public schools do, and see if they can do about the same.

I work at the public school. I double dog, snake, cat, dare you to come in and show where we are wasting half our money. And you can forget about your union spin down here in Georgia buddy because collective bargining is against the law for teachers here. Uh oh.

What actually happens here is that the kids go to their parochial schools up into high school and then they transfer in, finally giving up their daily prayers and their segregated classrooms because they want our name on their diploma. As though they have the same education as those who went all the way through in our system, which they don't. At least they only had to sit in class with the Muslim kids, the Japanese kids, and the Black kids, and the Hispanic kids for a season or two.

I see today that the administration has a big new voucher plan it is touting, once again aimed at destroying public education.