We Don't Need No (Public) Education.

More slimy stories about sleazeball Bill Bennett, the self-appointed virtue guru, continue to bubble to the surface in the wake of his racist attempts to link Blacks to crime. Mr. Bennett, as many probably know, was Secretary of Education under Ronald Reagan. While Reagan worked to dismantle the social safety net, Bennett was key to undermining public education through neglect and hostility.

Now we find out just how unsuited Bennett, the man who wrote the so-called Book of Virtues, was for his position at the Department of Education. Reed Hundt, who was Chairman of the FCC from 1993 to 1997, recounts his encounter with Bennett over an initiative to get funding to wire schools, including the public schools:

At any rate, since Mr. Bennett had been Secretary of Education I asked him to
support the bill in the crucial stage when we needed Republican allies. He told
me he would not help, because he did not want public schools to obtain new
funding, new capability, new tools for success. He wanted them, he said, to fail
so that they could be replaced with vouchers,charter schools, religious schools,
and other forms of private education.

Ah, you have to love the Republican Party, which is not to say that the Democrats are the bringers of all wisdom either (mainly being cringing fools more intent on being safe than being correct).

I don't know how many times in the last five years I've stopped and thought to myself, man people just aren't that stupid. And in many cases, I've been proven wrong.

Public education is the backbone of this country, and if it isn't working, you fix it. You don't dismantle it in favor of scattered experiments that to date have shown no actual improvements over the public schools. The charter school movement, while it can be romantically alluring, has provided no substantive improvements while at the same time giving less accountability than traditional public schools. Education is too precious to allow the so-called "free market" to destroy it through a rush to the bottom.