We Have Passed the Tipping Point for American Liberalism
Every once in a while, I come across something that I find almost impossible to believe. Somebody sends me a document or a link to an article, and I am stunned.
I have just learned of an official study in the Los Angeles school district that says that, by 2020, the school district is going to be in a fiscal crisis of monumental proportions. Already, Chicago's schools are also facing this.
Here is what a November report by the Independent Financial Review Panel reveals:
If the District desires to continue as a growing concern beyond [Fiscal Year] 2019-20, capable of improving the lives of students and their families, then a combination of difficult, substantial and immediate decisions will be required. Failure to do so could lead to the insolvency of the LAUSD, and the loss of local governance authority that comes from state takeover.
Exactly what is going wrong? Just about everything.
There is a declining enrollment in the public schools. The primary reasons are these. First, there is a declining birth rate within the city schools' jurisdiction. Second, there is an exodus into charter schools.
Tax money pays for the charter schools, but the charter schools have considerable independence from the unions and from the school board. Parents exercise more control over the charter schools than they do over the regular public schools. The charter schools are funded by taxes, but they don't have to take any student who comes in the door. They can be selective. So, they keep out the hoodlums. Parents who want their children educated in an environment in which the hoodlums are kept out enroll their kids in the charter schools.
This has always been why the labor unions and the school districts have hated the charter schools. They say the charter schools "skim off the cream." They are correct. The theory of democracy dies whenever a parent says, "I want my kids in a good school filled with students who want to learn." Public school teachers don't want competition. But the public in Los Angeles is getting its collective way, and the exodus is massive. Something in the range of 100,000 students are now in the charter schools instead of the public schools. This is enormous. I had no idea that it was on this scale.
Furthermore, there are about 17% fewer students inside Los Angeles County today, compared to the number in the year 2000. This is a demographic problem, and the school district cannot do anything about it.
But the spending hasn't stopped. The students have left the school district, but costs do not go down. Over half of the teachers and administrators in the school district make $75,000 a year or more. The union members are happy, but the school district is going to go bust within five years.
The local school district is paid by the state of California for the number of enrolled students. Declining enrollments have cut the state's subsidy to the school district by $100 million a year. That is not chump change. But the school district doesn't adjust. It doesn't cut salaries. It doesn't fire teachers. It doesn't fire administrators. It just keeps rolling along. But in this case, Old Man River is going to go over the falls.
What we're seeing is simply unprecedented in American history. Los Angeles and Chicago will have to start shutting down schools. Detroit has already done this. There is no hope for the Detroit school system. It just keeps getting worse. Large cities are losing the most important single tool of political control that they have: control over the education of the next generation. This centralized control is now disintegrating.
KHAN ACADEMY
I want to report on another astounding statistic. Again, I find it almost impossible to believe.
The federal government, every five or six years, surveys the number of homeschool students in the United States. In the latest report, which was released in 2011, the number was under 1.8 million. This had crept up, but it was obviously quite small. The government doesn't have to worry about this.
Then I got to thinking about the Khan Academy. In recent months, it has stated that it has over 26 million enrolled students. This is in 190 countries. So, I went to Alexa.com to see what percentage of the site's traffic is from the United States. It is approximately 50%. Inside the United States, the site is ranked number 522. This is incredibly high.
I realize that some of their students are in public school settings. But I don't think many of them are. A few selected schools use the Khan Academy. I am convinced the overwhelming majority of these enrolled students are homeschoolers.
If there are 26 million enrolled students, and half of these students are in the United States, we are talking about 13 million students. Add these to the two million students who are in the conventional homeschool programs. This gets to 15 million students. There are approximately 80,000,000 students enrolled in K-12 programs in the United States. This means that the homeschool population has moved from under 3% of students in 2010 to over 18%.
This is taking place because of one man who gets funding from Bill Gates and other multimillionaires. Salman Khan came out of nowhere to take over the educations of 26 million students. Furthermore, the number keeps growing.
The Khan Academy uses the Common Core Curriculum, which I think is a mistake. But so do the public schools. If you're going to get your child in a program structured by the Common Core Curriculum, you had better get him into the Khan Academy.
I grew up believing that the United States Postal Service could not be replaced. Yet, over the last 20 years, it has been replaced. It is a shell of its former self. It has almost no influence in the delivery of information today. Yet the Postal Service was a government monopoly long before the United States was formed, and a comparable monopoly in China goes back into medieval times. It was the way the government kept track of people. Today, the NSA tries to keep track of people, but it cannot do this. There are just too many people sending too many messages.
The gatekeepers really are on the run. They still control education above grade 12, but it is clear that the public school system is now on the defensive as never before in American history. Salman Khan has created a true revolution. I don't see that his teaching is radically outside the box of public education, but students are going to learn early in life that they don't need to be regimented in a classroom in order to learn. Even if the content of the education is the same as inside the public schools, the environment is totally different. The environment is now the family. That counts for more than the content of the education. Students can unlearn Keynesianism. But if they do not grow up within the environment of bells and lectures and football games and third-rate teachers, they're going to be far better educated at the age of 18 than previous generations have been.
Students in a regimented environment are taught to obey. There is no such environment online. That, in and of itself, constitutes a social revolution.
This is going on under the noses of the public. The bureaucrats have yet to adjust to any of this. They cannot adjust. They cannot cut their costs. They are headed for a brick wall, and they are not looking for the off ramp. They are going to hit the brick wall.
VICTORY
I'm not saying that we are winning this ideologically. I am saying that we are winning it institutionally and administratively.
The institutions are moving towards decentralization. This is anathema to the welfare-warfare statists. They are literally losing control, even if Salman Khan is not radically challenging the content of humanistic education. He is certainly no radical. He is a graduate of the Harvard Business School. His outlook and his teaching methods are going to shape the minds of tens of millions of students around the world. More important, they are going to shape the learning environments of these students. He is pulling them out of state-run classrooms.
The children who are coming up through the Khan Academy today go at their own pace. Nobody tells them what to do and when to do it. They take exams, and if they pass the exams, they go on to the next level. There is no one nagging them. There is no one telling them that class is over because a bell has rung. They are not being regimented.
If you have read the great book by John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education, you understand that the regimentation of the American school system was at the heart of it. I think he exaggerated form over content. Read Rushdoony's Messianic Character American Education to understand the underlying worldview of the educators: salvation by public education. But because of these two foundations -- ideological and institutional -- the state was the big winner.
Now the state is losing the institutional environment. A generation of students will grow up who will not respond effectively to the institutional controls that their parents, grandparents, and great grandparents learned to accept during 12 or 13 years of classroom education.
Ideas have consequences. So do environments. The state is losing control over the environments. Decentralization is undermining anyone's control over the flow of ideas. The gatekeepers have been routed. As I've said many times, the symbolic, representative example was Matt Drudge's exposé of Newsweek's spiking of the Lewinsky story. That was in 1998.
We are winning this war. Our primary enemies are in retreat. They talk about victory, but they don't have many.
The heart of the state's control system is the public school system. Take away this, and liberalism goes into full-scale retreat. In the United States, we are beyond the tipping point now. The big city public school systems are going to be outflanked by rival programs within 20 years, and this will be visible within 10 years. I didn't think this was possible. I now think it's inevitable.