Any legitimacy that the school evaluations might have had disappeared when one reads that Thornton Academy received a D because they were four students short of the mandated 95 percent. You don’t need to be very smart to figure out that the number of students participating has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of education.
Next, it is well to remember that the 10th point of the Communist Manifesto is to seize control of the education system. And, John Dewey, an atheist and father of American public education, wrote plainly that the intention was not to teach children to think, rather to teach them to be good little automatons (slaves) for the socialist state.
One may also consider that home-schooled children regularly trounce public school children in all manner of academic competition. Private schools do come in a close second, especially the Catholic schools, but even they have their problems as the teaching nuns who had the solution to attention deficit (they would smack you on the hand to get your attention) have all but died out thanks to the Second Vatican Council.
Just as with all other goods and services offered to the public, the solution is the free market: private schools, controlled completely at the local level and all government interference removed. Granted, the schools will never be equal, but then they would never be equal anyway. Each and every school would be as good as it could be according to the desires of the parents. All the schools would undoubtedly be better than they are now without bloated, useless administrations, micromanagement of teachers and bureaucratic hoops to jump through to get federal funding for foolish programs that are counterproductive.
The more money the federal government has thrown at education, the worse it has become. It is so bad, America is now 13th of 14 developed countries. All of this occurred after the creation of the Department of Education. Could this be an indicator? If so, what would it indicate?
Frank Novotny, Biddeford
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