The former president and his children have done their part to attack public education and those that work in the industry. Everyone knows I’m one of those people. His son called us losers and the former guy said no one should let us watch their children for 20 minutes much less teach them anything. We’ve heard all this before and the important thing is understanding why. It is also important to understand exactly why U.S. public schools don’t outperform their counterparts in Europe and Asia and why most private schools outperform their public counterparts.

See, that’s the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is to make public schools so unpalatable that most people won’t have a choice but to go private. So, we allow pay to lag for teachers, we insult them and belittle them, and then when there’s a teacher shortage we begin to water down the qualifications teachers must have. Both Arizona and Florida have announced that teachers don’t have to have a Bachelor’s degree.

Most red states are not far behind. Our very own governor threw a commission together to see why there’s a teacher shortage and initially included only one teacher. We could have saved him the money. All of this is by design. They know very well what they are doing. They can offer vouchers and school choice, but that will end up being a band-aid for a gun shot wound. Of course, given the recent mass shootings in our schools, such an euphemism is a little on the nose.

Private schools work for one reason and one reason only. The schools get to choose who goes to school there. It’s the same reason that schools in Europe and Asia outperform our public schools. When you get to choose who takes the test it is remarkable how well they will perform collectively. Imagine an English class where the teacher can pick 20 percent of his or her class to be exempt from the test. We’d have nearly 100 percent passing rate. Boy would we look great.

Simply put, the minute you tell a private school who they have to take is the minute you negate their primary advantage. Plus, a 5000 dollar voucher does little when the average tuition in Texas is over 10,000. Many of the top parochial and Catholic schools can cost more than twice that amount. A lower middle class family can’t afford to send even one child to such a school much less multiple children.

Even if you subsidized the entire tuition costs, the child still has to meet the admission requirements. What happens if they have intellectual disabilities, learning disabilities, or physical disabilities? What happens if they have behavioral problems? A private school can simply say no. As a former private school teacher, I can attest to this. Some of their margins are so thin that they can’t afford to pay specialists. If your kid needs extra help he or she will need to go to public school.

Yet, we will be stripping those same public schools of crucial resources. We will be flooding their classrooms with only those students that were too poor or somehow not fit enough to be accepted to one of those schools. They can’t explain what happens to them and they don’t particularly care. I’ve also been in schools that were the last choice in a school choice district. Someone has to care about these kid

A few days ago I talked about the death of the Republican party. I see Republicans everywhere. What in the hell am I talking about? Obviously, what you are seeing could be classified as political zombies. So, it becomes important to provide just one example of how the lack of a viable conservative alternative is impacting citizens on a regular basis.

The economy has done better under Democrats than under Republicans since World War II. You could probably go further back than that, but if we go back beyond FDR we run into problems of how we can define Democrats and Republicans. Part of that can be in how we even look at problems. One of those problems has been the rising costs of college and the college loan debt in the country. Conservatives seem to have the same outlook as they do on big business. That’s because college is big business. In Texas, they lifted caps on tuition. Not surprisingly, those costs have gone up to what we see now.

If you compare that with trends in education overall you can’t help but notice the gap. For those that don’t want to look at the data too hard, I would simply point out that Texas spends somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 per student each year. Obviously, exact figures fluctuate, but it is fairly staggering when you think about all that includes.

I’m officially not a classroom teacher. I am a support facilitator. I go into other teacher’s classrooms. Our campus doesn’t even have anyone that is profoundly disabled. Other campuses have to include support facilitators and those that provide more invasive support. These are things that most colleges and universities don’t provide. That all factors into that cost per student.

If you take a look at the costs for people to attend college in Texas you will notice that only one school came in below 23,000 per year when all expenses were considered. Multiply that four or five times and you’ll see the total cost of a degree. As you might suspect, the number of people that have 92,000 dollars lying around is between slim and none.

So, keep in mind that the cost of college is more than double that of public schools when they don’t even include special education services in most instances. They don’t provide free and reduced lunch. There certainly aren’t nearly as many guidance counselors and they really don’t employ assistant principals. The battle over student loan debt seems to be ignoring the most important element in most instances. Why in all holy hell is college so damn expensive in the first place?

A vibrant conservative party could provide some answers to this dilemma. Instead, they stoke passions amongst the old and inspire them to go into one of those “back in my day” kind of diatribes. I paid off my loans. Why in the hell should they simply erase the debt now? Well, we could start off by pointing out that college costs have skyrocketed over the past 50 years.

You lose your conservative card if you give anyone anything (unless they represent big business). So, it is not surprising that they would push back against retiring college debt. Yet, there seems to be no effort to actually provide any solutions to the problem. Instead, they let the “free market” decide and the free market is what ballooned costs in the first place.

The question is whether higher education is something worth investing in or whether it should continue to go to the highest bidder. Some people might consider free tuition to be a bridge too far. That’s certainly a reasonable opinion, but those that shoot down ideas should be coming up with some of their own.