Is a Good Education a Lottery Win?

I watched recently the movie “The Lottery”.  It was about Harlem school children trying to get into the Harlem Success public charter school.  This school like most (not all) charter schools is dramatically outperforming their counterparts in the public schools.  I recently heard Ron Richard, President of the Cleveland Foundation talk about the sorry state of Cleveland schools.  The issue is not money, it is effectiveness.

The main problem – the teacher’s unions.  The unions goal is job security, even if it is at the expense of children’s education.  Our schools are woefully underperforming other countries.  Only 50% of kids in the inner city will graduate.  Of those the average kid is reading at an 8th grade level.  Only 20% are actually reading at their grade level.  The unions don’t care about your kids, they care about their jobs.  That is why unions are not about reform, but about politics.  New York City in the last two years has fired only 3 out of 55,000 tenured teachers.  It is nearly impossible to fire a poor performing teacher. 

It will take a grass roots effort to root out the unions and get accountability in the public schools.  The logical path is to offer alternatives whether publicly or privately funded.  Harlem Success takes the same public funds and turns out a good product.  It is the fact that the teachers are held accountable and the teachers themselves are not hamstrung by an ineffective system.