Better that everyone eat gruel than for only some people to get steak. Ever notice how socialism never raises anyone up, but only equalizes misery?

So intelligent and well-behaved children must be sacrificed so that thugs--those who don't quite reach the felony level, but would have gotten the boot in every school I went to--don't have to have their feelings hurt. That's okay--the good kids are useful as "good examples" to the thugs, as well as a ready source of lunch money and beating targets. Heck, the kids who aren't thugs probably had some unfair advantages to start with compared with the thugs, so it's only right.

As for decent kids with learning disabilities or physical handicaps, are we going to condemn an education concept because they "might" decide to leave such kids out? Never mind that current laws make it illegal for ANY private business to discriminate against such people, and I have great difficulty believing that voucher or private schools would be the one entity exempt from this.

As for the Einstein Academy, I don't have time to research this thoroughly. Suffice it to say, the public school establishment is not exactly bending over backwards to help their competition, and have little good to say about it.

In my personal opinion, "charter schools" that are free to parents but charge the school district are a kludge, the sort of half-assed attempt to squash socialist and free-market solutions into one unworkable lump. When the district is billed directly, and parents see no costs to themselves, there are no market forces to keep things in line (see also California Energy "Deregulation.") Private schools will only work properly as a competitive industry when parents are directly picking up at least some costs. Market incentives won't work otherwise, and we'll be in danger of winding up with the education version of Medicare. At least vouchers offer a limited amount of specific funding that the parents have to work with.

Still, if charter schools give parents more choice, it's probably a good thing in the short run.

* * *

Every now and then something happens that strips the veneer from some portion of the liberal establishment and reveals the true motives of what lies underneath. For the environmental movement, this happened for me back when cold fusion was the big thing and still was considered possible. The reaction of many of the leaders of the environmental movement and the Left, which should have wildly cheered the thought of a clean, cheap energy source, told me all I needed to know about their true motivations.

Here in San Francisco, when a private, profit-making educational organization came in to educate kids, the reaction of the public education establishment and the SF politicians told me all I needed to know about their motives too.

Read the article. Look what's happening. Can you make any case at all that the prime interest of the Board of Education is seeing that these kids get an education? These are hard-core socialists who loath the Edison school for one reason only: it is a private company that is making a profit, and they hate the private sector down to the marrow of their bones. They have said as much. And it's clear they will stop at nothing to destroy it, including lies and trumped-up charges. Edison's relative success in the face of their own decades of money-devouring failure can't be going over very well either.

The public education bureaucracy in this country is no different from any other government bureaucracy. This isn't about education--it's about power and money.

Freedom works. There are a hell of a lot of people who don't want it to.

Edison Press release, July 13, 2001

The Edison home page.