A big strike against a President Bloomberg and an indication of the inanity of government running schools.
50 New York Schools Fail Under Rating System
The idea that someone who has never taught in a classroom would understand enough to decide which schools should stay open and which ones shouldn't is just so much inanity and foolishness that I can hardly believe that we live in 21st century America.
This is why we need school choice and a free education market. Adam Smith and Milton Friedman have more to say to create better schools than the whole lot of politicians and bureaucrats in Washington D.C., New York City, and every major city in the country, combined - even politicians committed, in principle, to and who have benefitted from the free market like Michael Blumberg.
Smith and Friedman are right. What America and every liberal democratic country needs is to live up to its liberal ideals, to take liberty seriously, and to set free non-profit and for-profit markets in schools all over the world.
The truth is that illiberal forces in the world will always use everything that goes wrong in education and in any area of life to argue for as much power as they can acquire. We need strong liberal commitments to make our cultures stronger. It is perfectly clear, really, that it is liberalism that makes our cultures stronger since liberal democracies are, by far, the strongest, most vibrant, most decent societies in the world, today. All cultures need stronger liberal commitments, meaning a greater commitment to the freedom of people to choose their destinies and to use that freedom to build all of the best institutions that we take for granted. But liberal cultures, in particular, need to live up to their liberal commitments.
And Milton Friedman was right. The single most important basic institution that needs our strongest liberal commitments - meaning commitments to the freedom of people to choose their destinies and how to live their lives - is education and the schools that support it.
And if Michael Bloomberg, a millionaire made rich beyond most peoples' wildest dreams, cannot be trusted to let schools, teachers, administrators, parents, and students to sort out these matter on their own, then no politician, in all likelihood, can be trusted to do so. Schools should be run by the people closest to their day-to-day operations, and government should only have a say in a law enforcement capacity in situations where there is imminent physical danger that schools cannot possibly be expected to care for on their own. Other than that, the education market should be free, meaning people should figure such matters out on their own. They will make mistakes. But they will be their mistakes. And they can be mistakes on a road to learned lessons rather than no lessons because central school operations are so bound up in district, city, state, and federal regulation.
There is no better case for a free market in the U.S. than public education, today. Because it is the one area of our lives where efforts to create the kinds of opportunities we imagine will only be available once people are free to choose. And, as Milton Friedman was convinced, it is the most important institution for us to set free.
