This commentary was first published in the Minnesota Free Market Institute Weekly Update. For your free subscription, click here.
Neal McCluskey of the Cato Institute (“Feds in the Classroom“) alerts us to a truly disturbing consequence of the federal government’s intervention in education. The U.S. Constitution provides no grant of authority for federal involvement in education. As the founders recognized, a government that has no moral authority to mandate how people worship has no moral authority to indoctrinate people as to how or what to think. The commonality of freedom of religion and freedom of education, blurred by the No Child Left Behind Act, is about to be obliterated by President Obama’s September 8 address to the nation’s school children.
The president’s speech is not simply an extended public service announcement encouraging students to work hard and stay in school, a message most of us would agree is worthwhile for any president to deliver and every student to hear. The president’s speech is the point of the spear in a concentrated campaign that exposes the dangers of a monopoly system of government-run education.
Irrespective of who controls the White House, an education system manipulated by the president and the Department of Education is not in keeping with the principles of a free society.
As a prelude to the President’s speech, the taxpayer-funded U.S. Department of Education (remember when Americans took seriously the idea that Department of Education should be abolished?) has sent detailed lesson plans for grades pre-K-6 and 7-12 to schools nationwide. The lesson plans, “developed by and for teachers,” outline ways to capitalize on the message of the president’s speech - how to support the president and his goals - not the educational opportunity to teach critical thinking and analysis.
In a letter anticipating the president’s address, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan flatters teachers by noting that their work is “critical to…our social progress.” As McCluskey notes, Duncan’s statement strongly suggests - “as many educators have held and continue to hold” - that it is the job of public schools to impose values, often collectivist, on students. The lesson plans sent out by Duncan do little to dispel that idea.
Pre-K-6 kids are encouraged to make posters setting out “community and country” goals. The lessons encourage schools to teach that it is important to listen to “the President and other elected officials.” Even more than just listen is guidance that is explicitly designed to glorify the office of the presidency and Barack Obama specifically. Teachers are encouraged to ask students how President Obama will “inspire” them in his speech before he gives it, and how they were inspired after he has spoken.
Again, let me be clear: This idea of a “cult of the presidency” is being exploited in the extreme by the Obama administration, but it is a bipartisan malady. As I wrote during the presidential campaign, both Obama and Sen. John McCain campaigned for a presidency that is nowhere to be found in the Constitution - as is constitutional authority absent for a federal role in education.
The thrust of McCluskey’s work in general points out the inherent dangers of government controlling education (again irrespective of who controls the White House). Power corrupts, and ultimately politicians will use power over education to indoctrinate children, something completely antithetical to a free society. And this is just the starkest manifestation of the inherent problem with government control of education. Every day, writes McCluskey, free people are pitted against one another in defense of their freedom and basic values because they all have to support a single system of government schools.
“Evolution vs. creationism. Prayer in school. Books with offensive material in schools libraries. Decisions over whose history will be taught, and whose won’t. The curtailment of freedom goes on and on when government takes everyone’s money and provides schools with it,” writes McCluskey. “Which is why the only system of learning compatible with a truly free society is a system of school choice - public education, not schooling - in which the public assures that all people can access education, but parents are free to choose their children’s schools, and educators are free to educate how they wish.
Andrew Coulson, also of the Cato Institute, notes the irony of the president saying nice things about kids staying in school and graduating while his own actions and policies are having the opposite effect. Although there is copious scientific research showing that private schools have higher graduation rates than public schools, and that their graduates are more likely to go on to college and complete college, and the president’s own Department of Education found that the DC voucher program is producing significantly better academic results than DC public schools (and at a quarter of the cost), the President Obama has chosen to kill the DC voucher program rather than grow it, and he opposes private school choice programs at the state level that would bring these better educational outcomes within reach of all children.
“So kids, here’s your lesson for next Tuesday,” he writes. “The guy talking at you from the television set may say a lot of nice sounding things, but he is not doing what is best for you. He is letting some combination of ideology and political self-interest trump what is best for you. That’s politics. And that’s one reason why we need limited government and educational freedom.
Amen.
The headline in the Pioneer Press seemed to tell the story: ‘DFL budget plan would have cost fewer jobs, state economist says.’
Health care: Life and death and substance
It’s unfortunate that some opponents of federal government-directed health care jumped on the ‘Death Panel’ metaphor instead of the substance of the proposed legislation. Whether the federal legislation intends it or not, a government-directed plan necessarily requires bureaucrats to make life and death decisions that are more far-reaching and more complex than the hyperbolic ‘pulling the plug on grandma.’
No matter how wealthy we are as a nation, the government will never be able to provide health care for all AND provide all of the health care everyone would want. Trade-offs are inevitable; if universal access is a given, then the amount and quality of delivered medical treatment must necessarily be negotiable.
To understand the complexity and God-like power the feds are proposing to invest in some poor civil servants, let’s allow grandma to peacefully nap and consider the other end of the life spectrum, infant mortality. Imagine yourself charged with managing the cost of care for newborn infants under the government program. Here’s the situation you would face.
The U.S. has an infant mortality rate of approximately 7 deaths per 1,000 live births, compared with 5 deaths in other developed countries; in Norway, infant mortality is a mere 4.1. Race, geography, income and education all factor into those numbers, but irrespective of its genesis, low birth weight is a primary factor in infant mortality.
Low birth weight occurs in about 7 percent to 8 percent of all live births, but 40 percent to 70 percent of all infant deaths can be attributed to low birth weight (depending on how one defines “low”). When compared to normal weight infants (more than 5.5 lbs), infants with “moderate” (less than 5.5 lbs), “very low” (less than 3.3 lbs) and “extremely low” (less than 2.2 lbs) birth weights have 40, 200 and 600 times greater risk than normal weight infants, respectively.
According to the journal “Pediatrics,” 8 percent of 4.6 million infant hospital stays (2001 data) included a preterm/low-birth-weight diagnosis, accounting for 47 percent of the costs for all hospitalizations ($5.8 billion) and 27 percent of all pediatric stays. The average cost of the hospital stay (12.9 days) was $15,100 compared with $600 (1.9 days) for uncomplicated births. For infants less than 2.2 lbs, the average cost of hospitalization was $65,600.
Advances in medical technology have significantly improved the survival chances of infants with extremely low birth weights (without complications), but at a high cost. Complications, however, are common in infants with low birth weights, often requiring intensive, expensive care; still, the mortality rates remain relatively high.
What do you do? Here’s more data.
A study by the Rand Corporation found that 69 percent of infants who die during their initial hospital stay did so within one day of birth. Those infants were the least expensive to treat, an average of $6,310. For infants who died during the remainder of their initial hospitalization, average treatment was $58,800. Infants at “extremely low” birth weights, in aggregate, create the most costs; technology keeps them alive past the first day, but despite the extra effort and added cost, infants born weighing less than 2.2 lbs have the lowest initial hospitalization survival rate.
More data to consider: The aggregate annual incremental costs among low-birth-weight children ages birth to 15 have been estimated at $5.4 billion per year, not including long-term care, special services and special education often correlated with low-birth-weight children. All that said, remember, those are aggregate statistics; many low-birth-weight children grow into healthy, happy adults with no unusual health problems - you just don’t know who they will be.
So, were you tasked with managing the public newborn-care option, what would you do? Should the public health plan allow spending billions of tax dollars on technology and treatment attempting to save low-birth-weight infants when that practice has a high probability of complications yielding a relatively low survival rate with a high probability of ongoing medical and other expenses associated with survival?
Access, quality and cost — you cannot reduce costs if your promise is equal effort for every low-birth-weight child using whatever technology and treatment is available. In Switzerland, a country often cited for a lower infant mortality rate than the United States, infants weighing less than 2.2 lbs. at birth who die are designated stillborn, whether measures are taken to help them survive or not. Problem solved?
Infant mortality highlights the underlying question of the health care reform debate: How can individuals deal with unpredictable, unaffordable expenses? Neither the regulated, privately managed care approach we have today nor the government-run managed care proposals being debated in Congress provide an acceptable answer. A free market system where patients control the money, health care providers set prices for services, and private insurers are free to develop policies that convert unpredictable and unaffordable events into affordable and predictable premiums, could well be the best way to optimize (not perfect) health care resources.
Unfortunately, in the progressive rush to birth a government-run solution, the free-market solution is designated “stillborn.”
This commentary originally appeared in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Friday August 28.
Photo Caption: Neonatalogist Jonathan Muraskas places his hand next to Rumaisa Rahman, known to be the smallest baby in the world to survive birth (8.6 ounces). Rumaisa was born at Loyola University Medical Centre in Chicago. Photo: Reuters