I watched Stossel’s program and thought it pretty close to a 10. The only key omission, in my view, was the failure to get someone — Thomas Sowell would have been first pick — to point out that there is an innate and fatal flaw in government schooling, namely that the cost of failure does not fall on the providers of poor education, but rather on the students. Now, that point was made implicitly several times, most effectively with the case of the South Carolina high school kid who struggled to read third grade books, yet in a meeting with school officials, they said he was “making good progress.” Then the fellow goes to Sylvan Learning for a few weeks and makes more reading progress than he did in years in government school. Direct hit! But many Americans don’t get implicit messages (thanks to you know what) and need to have things made plain and simple.
I’m not surprised to hear from Terry that the teacher unions are doing their darndest to trash the program and pretend that since they are the experts, no one should pay attention to “outsiders.” The thing the education establishment does best, after all, is not teaching, but public relations and “damage control.”
