We know how to teach children to read. The techniques are well known and private schools and tutoring systems do it all the time. One of the best known examples is Sylvan Learning Center, which guarantees to improve a child’s math or reading skills “by one full grade level equivalent in only 36 hours of instruction.” Why can’t public schools teach children to read?

The answer, of course, is government bureaucracy resistant to change, saysNew York Times columnist Brent Staples. He cites the poor performance of the Washington, D.C., school district as a prime example, saying its “leadership . . . appears to have been invested in unproved strategies and business as usual.”

In this stark reality which will surely confound more liberal readers, it is the private schools which provide the safety net for those the public school system fails. This is most especially true for students with so-called learning disabilities.

As it turns out, in public schools, many children wind up labeled “learning disabled” when the problem is with the curriculum, not the student.

Some severely disabled children will always need be educated outside the public system. But many of the so-called learning-disabled children who flee public schools for private education are victims of disastrous reading instruction.

Nearly all of these children could be reached through methods like those that have been used for decades at specialized schools or that have recently been touted in the research literature. It won’t be easy to put these programs in place. But with the dollar costs of special education spiraling upward — and the dangers of mass illiteracy painfully clear — there’s no time like the present to get started. — New York Times

Wait a minute, the public schools are dismal failures, especially with severely disabled children, and the private schools are picking up the slack?

“This kind of reality-based heresy could easily get Mr. Staples rhetorically stoned by public school zealots,” said Cato Institute policy analyst Neal McCluskey. “It’s also the kind of heresy that needs to be repeated over, and over, and over again.”

Okay. Public institutions will always need a private safety net to catch those who fall through the cracks of the public system, always poorly run, wasteful and ineffective in comparison with their private counterparts.

What they certainly don’t need is for another government to come in and take them over, as has happened in Chicago, Boston, Detroit, and elsewhere.

“What the children of Chicago, L.A., and every other American city and town need is not more central planning from the mayor’s office or the statehouse,” said Andrew Coulson, director for Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom. “What they need is the ability to easily kiss bad schools goodbye and transfer to better ones.”

This is true everywhere, even in the poorest parts of Africa, where people know government schools don’t work, and even go so far as to pay what is for them significant amounts of money to enroll their children in illegal private schools in order to give them a better education, while massive foreign aid poured into countries’ state-run education systems goes to waste, like a canteen poured out in the desert.

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