The Self-Licking Ice Cream Cones of Education

Our students are starving while Educrats enjoy a sugar high.

“In political jargon, a self-licking ice cream cone is a self-perpetuating system that has no purpose other than to sustain itself.” Our educational system is a triple scoop waffle cone with sprinkles, whipped cream and a cherry on top.

Here are 3 examples of how government schools are self-imposing problems that result in huge payouts and keep their failing system fed:

ICE CREAM CONE #1: COVID SCHOOL SHUTDOWN

When former Virginia Governor Ralph Northam shut down schools for Covid, students experienced devastating learning loss and psychological harm.  To “fix” the serious problems they caused, what did government schools do?

They rewarded themselves with billions of dollars in cash for programs, staff, and supplies to get students back on track. Conveniently, a problem they created led to receiving one of the largest blank checks in public school history.

They were given record amounts of taxpayer money for resources and staff to enlarge and enrich a system that should have been criminally prosecuted for closing our schools in the first place.

Lick…lick.  

ICE CREAM CONE #2: SPECIAL EDUCATION

The “Individualized Education Plan” or “IEP” is a specialized plan for any student identified with certain learning or developmental disabilities according to IDEA, or the “Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.”

Yet it seems no matter how many increasing billions of dollars are spent to assist students with IEP’s, their numbers continue to rise.  

In the 2015 book “Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America's Children,” authors Samuel Blumenfeld and Alex Newman share why.

 “One of the great unrecognized crimes being committed every day in our public schools is turning perfectly normal, intelligent children into dyslexics, or lifelong functional illiterates.”

They drew a painstaking historical roadmap of America’s educational decline beginning with the implementation of progressive instruction in the early 1900’s by John Dewey.

His method and philosophy were the “original sins” of education and from that point on the authors say, schools began their academic nosedive.

Sadly, many  parents still believe that the same institution that likely caused their child’s learning difficulty in the first place can solve it.  

Despite the overall record levels of spending on special education, students with learning disabilities continue to show no improvements whatsoever.

Lick…Lick…

ICE CREAM CONE #3: HIGH-NEED SCHOOLS

This tops the list as the government’s greatest scheme of all time.

If you know that schools are financially incentivized to poorly educate children, it should come as no surprise why we’re seeing a record number of low-performing or “high need” schools and of course, demand to increase funding for them.

When Educrats talk about the need for more money in education, they’re almost always talking about high-need or Title I schools. Title I is the largest educational funding program in America.

When schools fail to educate students properly, it sets them up for lifelong failure. The will end up underemployed or unemployed, live in a low-income neighborhood and wind up having children of their own going high-need schools. Rinse and repeat.  

Churning out poor-performing students is a cash cow for the Educational Industrial Complex. Why on earth would they want to educate children properly when it would only reduce or eliminate one of their greatest sources of funding and job-security?

 Lick…lick…

CONCLUSION

In the mid 20^th century, Thomas Sowell, the prestigious economist and social scientist also noticed the lucrative nature of school failure.

“So long as public schools are treated as places that exist to provide guaranteed jobs to members of the teachers’ unions, do not be surprised to see American students continuing to score lower on international tests than students in countries that spend a lot less per pupil than we do.”

He also saw the rise of racial “equity “and obsession with psycho-social curriculum and ideological indoctrination, policies of grade inflation and dumbing down of academic subjects as nothing but self-serving, self-inflicted wounds. He knew our schools were not in it for the education of kids.

Schools are on a sugar high while our children are starving for an education. It’s time to take the ice cream cone from the toddler. How do we do that? Demand REAL school choice.