Gingrich Productions
January 31, 2014
Newt Gingrich
To receive Newt’s weekly newsletters, click here.
One of the great parts about being a consumer these days is that many of items we like to buy–computers, smartphones, and televisions, for instance–every year are higher quality with more choice at declining cost. This is true not just of electronics, but of a wide range of products.
Walmart and more recently Amazon are the two clearest examples: Each offers an astounding variety of products at very narrow margins, and they’ve developed sophisticated systems for customers to evaluate items before they buy.
This drive to improve cost and quality has won them tens of millions of happy customers. Walmart accounts for roughly 3 percent of the country’s GDP. Amazon sold 426 items per second in the weeks before Christmas.
Although they improve the lives of millions of people, these businesses aren’t increasing quality and choice while lowering cost simply out of altruism. They have to do it, because they have to compete with each other. Every customer at Walmart has the option to place an Amazon order instead right from his or her smartphone. That’s the magic of competition.
But if being a consumer recently has meant higher quality at declining cost, the world of education has moved in the opposite direction. Even after two decades of astonishing progress in information technology, we still trap our students in schools that offer higher cost and declining quality.
Spending on elementary and secondary education has gone up almost 40 percent since 2001, with no substantial improvement in outcomes. Twelve years later, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan argues that “our public schools must greatly accelerate the rate of progress of the last four years and do more to narrow America’s large achievement gaps,” describing the mission of improving schools as an “urgent moral and economic imperative.”
This is an understatement, as we all know. Last year only 36 percent of eighth graders were proficient in math, and the rate for reading was the same. Our schools are failing a majority of our students.
Should we keep doing the same things that have failed for decades to improve schools, then, or should we make some big changes?
It’s clear that the only way we will see the major improvements in learning is by opening up schools to competition, forcing them to compete for students as Walmart and Amazon compete for customers. And as I argued last week, the only way to promote competition and innovation in education is to fund the students, not the school, so families can vote with their feet.
Two U.S. senators, Lamar Alexander from Tennessee and Tim Scott from South Carolina, have introduced pioneering legislation this week to promote school choice for those Americans who need it most. Their efforts could be an important step toward giving every student in the United States the option to choose the school that is best for him or her.
Senator Alexander’s bill, the Scholarships for Kids Act, would consolidate roughly $24 billion of federal education funding and allow states to make it available to low income students to help pay for the public, private, or charter school of their choice. This could potentially allow millions of poor children to escape from the failing schools they’re trapped in based only on their neighborhoods.
Senator Scott’s CHOICE Act would allow states to provide similar school choice opportunities for students with disabilities. It would also create portable scholarships for the children of military families on certain military bases.
These are critical steps toward creating a breakout in learning. If federal funding for education remains locked up by school district, it will be impossible to create the competition we need to foster innovation.
Call or write your senators today and urge them to support this important school choice legislation.
To receive Newt’s weekly newsletters, click here.