Rural Missouri Special Education Students Need Some Alternatives

My children seem to thrive in the schools available to them. Fortunately so, because there is only one option for each grade level; one elementary, one junior high school, and one high school. However, there are students in their classes that are not so lucky. In our small town, there are over 200 children with some sort of disability. Granted, not all of those children require special learning requirements, but some do. These students need the option of transferring to another school if ours cannot educate them properly. The ones stuck in our schools are going to constantly fall behind the rest of the children and may suffer form it the rest of their lives.

According to the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), there are about 130,618 students in Missouri with some sort of disability. Again, not all of whom who need special education services. About 48,100 students have a specific learning disability, 11,629 are mentally retarded, and 4,534 students have autism. Many of these students require special education and it is not always available to them. These students may fall through the cracks and this will affect the rest of their lives. They should be given the chance at success too.

Jack Wenders, a School Choice Activist

Activists and school choice proponents believe in choice very strongly. Along with supporting the cause, many of them do extensive research on the issue and contribute financially. It is a serious issue, and I am grateful for the people that make it come to light.

School funding, school choice, and the monopoly on education were strong issue’s with the late Jack Wenders. He was highly interested in the downfalls of the bureaucracy of public schools and the monopolistic attitude in which they are ran. He felt parental choice and market incentives could solve some of these problems. Wenders passed away last November leaving millions to the Cato Institute. The Cato Insititute is a policy think tank in Washington D.C. It examines the ideas of limited government, individual liberty, free markets, and peace.

In an article Wenders wrote for The Cato Journal, he shows that 36 of the expenditures of public schools are wasted. This goes to show schools need to be more accountable for their expenditures and proves the schools do not need more money. He also published pieces in Cato’s Regulation. His legacy lives on in many ways, and we hope his research and support for parental choice and reforming education is makes a difference.

Hopefully, we can all learn from the lessons he was teaching us. We need to reform our education system. Our children need to be inspired, they need to learn, and they need to be taught properly. The time is now to change the education monopoly and make it something that actually works.

NCLB?

Submitted by Katie

The result of the "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) legislation is just more bureaucracy, plain and not so simple. The good intentions of the law signed in by both parties in 2002 have merely added another layer of red-tape in an already defunct and disparaging public education system. The law, instead of raising academic excellence as it was intended to do, has instead shifted the focus of educators to 'teaching to the test' rather than focussing on individual needs of individual schools and children. Truly what has happened is a lowering of academic standards, exclusion of minorities in testing groups, decrease in emphasis on history, science, geography and civics and increase in reading and math in order to claim that the law has been satisfied. Is this what America was seeking?

In an illuminating commentary Paul M. Weyrich, Chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Research and Education Foundation, calls for an end to the "No Child Left Behind" agenda that President Bush intends to strengthen. He flat out calls for the end of NCLB in another commentary, "No Child Left Behind" Should Be Left Behind.

By handing over local control of our public education system to federal government, it's our families and kids who lose out. Individuals in local communities need to join forces and call upon thier local, state and federal representatives to step back and look at what has come from a HUGE bureaucracy that has lost sight of the rights of taxpayers to exercise choice and direction of their children's education.

What they are getting now are teachers who are forced to 'teach to the middle'. They are pressured to accept that you can't reach all kids, so you have to just shoot to the center and let go of those who cannot be raised by the standard curricula. Teachers are also pressured to advance children who are not ready BECAUSE of the NCLB law. This is exactly what the law was NOT intended to do!

Our public education system is a monopoly that, like any monopoly, serves itself and no other. This monopoly is run by powerful teachers unions, education bureaucrats and public school administrators working so hard at protecting their status quo that there is little hope of improving/reforming our public education. There are many great teachers out there who are not allowed to teach because they are forced to meet the criteria of the monopoly whose income is threatened when they fail to make the grade on nationally standardized tests.

America needs to completely reform our educational system with a multi-faceted solution--not a one-size-fits-all piece of legislation that traps teachers, parents and children in a defunct and failing school environment.