By Michael R. Shannon
I imagine the Postmaster General grinds his teeth when he thinks about how much easier his life would be, if he had a monopoly like the "public" schools. If customers were forced to buy the equivalent postage before they were allowed to ship FEDEX or UPS his competition worries would be over.
Then he would be free to test innovative shipping concepts like "mailing without boxes" or "approximate delivery" the same way the schools build "schools without walls" and introduce "fuzzy math."
We had a perfect example of education monopoly in action where I live, but before I get to that, take this brief exercise:
Let's say you have this concept for a new airline. It's completely different from other airlines; so different that you are not sure if the public will react favorably. Consequently, you start small with one plane.
Low and behold demand is tremendous from day one. People are camping on the tarmac so they will be first in line when a seat opens up. You add another plane, yet demand only increases. And that's in spite of the fact that your airline has a strict dress code and rules of conduct.
So what do you do? If you said buy more airplanes and meet customer demand, you'd be correct. You would also continue adding aircraft until the wait list disappears and the passenger load index starts to decline.
At the same time, you'd make sure the quality of your product remains consistent and you offer all the amenities of the competition, without diluting the standards that set your airline apart.
On the other hand, if you were a multi-degreed, highly credentialed education bureaucrat operating my analogy, you wouldn't do any of that because it conflicts with your Soviet theories of air travel.
On the contrary, you would restrict your air fleet to two planes and require each passenger to write an essay pleading for an opportunity to buy a ticket and justifying his desire to arrive at your particular destination.
Of course the essays are just busy work, because you like to make people jump through hoops. All ticket pleas are dumped into a big hopper and only six new names are drawn and allowed to fly each year.
The final indignity is after passengers have made a set number of trips, your rules require they be tossed off the aircraft and never allowed to fly again.
Now substitute "traditional" school for airline and you have the situation facing parents where I live.
We have two "traditional" schools with grade 1 through 8 - the first opening in 2000. Both schools have wait lists and only five or six spots open each year.
Parent's desire to have their children attend these schools is so strong they write the essay and wait expectantly for the lottery. I know because I wrote one - although the response evidently wasn't any better than I get with this column, because my son goes to "regular" school.
This means 94 percent of the parents are satisfied with the "traditional" education their children are receiving. By way of comparison, if Sprint - my former cell provider - only had a 6 percent disconnect it wouldn't be the sick man of cellular communication.
"Traditional" schools are a roaring success and parents obviously believe the staff and teachers are doing a fabulous job. The education is so important it makes up for the limited extracurricular activities offered.
Students there are essentially second-class in the eyes of the education bureaucrats. Neither school offers an athletics program like the other schools.
If parent want their child to compete in football, basketball, wrestling, soccer or other sports they just have to send them to Lord of the Flies Middle School like the other parents.
This year educrats surveyed parents and discovered 44 percent favor opening a "traditional" high school, so they are grudgingly considering the idea. And the potential due date of one of the options is 2016 - by which time the first crop of "traditional" students will be juniors in college!
But when you run a government monopoly there is no penalty for failure to plan ahead, unless you schedule snowplows.
Why the delay? For one, in the mind of an educrat "traditional" means retro and educrats prefer "paradigm shifting" breakthroughs in education theory like the recent decision in Arlington, VA to call "at-risk" students "at-promise" students instead.
Problem solved! What's next on the agenda?
Maybe the big thinkers at Indoctrination Control were hoping parents would change their collective mind and decide a school with uniforms, expectations, community service and discipline was a bad idea after all and embrace more "progressive" educational theory like "white guilt."
School administrators get away with this lethargy because parents don't have the kind of "public option" the country really needs. Parents who tire of unresponsive educrats and send their children to private schools pay double: property taxes for the public schools and tuition for the private.
If education money followed the student instead of vice versa, PWC school administrators would be sharing a seat at the legislative hearing table with the USPS ($3.4 billion lost and counting).
Michael R. Shannon is a public relations and advertising consultant with corporate, government and political experience around the globe. He is a dynamic and entertaining keynote speaker. He can be reached at
michael-shannon@comcast.net.
Michael R. Shannon
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