TheDuke's Domain

On Friday, the Cincinnati Enquirer had a story for those interested in seeing the state's monopoly over public education ended that is cause for some cheer. The story points out that the Cincinnati schools have lost about 1,200 more pupils this past year according to preliminary numbers released by the district. The interesting things to note are: 1) the chart on the right hand side of the article showing the district losing about 14,000 students in the past ten years. This has been a major decline in the number of students trapped by a mediocre system of schools. 2)The thing that regular readers of this blog should note is that the article doesn't even stop to consider the roles of overall migration to the suburbs, enrollment in parochial schools and the rise of homeschooling has had on these numbers in addition to the number of students enrolled in charter schools. This lack of coverage concerning a basic question demonstrates to me the statist viewpoint of many reporters.

I would like nothing better than to see the state butt out of education altogether and I would like to see more parents step up and take more control over their children's education. By the way, for those parents who are in the burbs', the problems of mediocre performance and other problems are going to come your way; it's just a matter of time before the problems of CPS find their way into Mason and Kings school districts. The best thing parents can do is to wrest control of their children's education away from the state. Period. God has assigned the primary responsibility for education to the parents. We should guard not only the fact that our children are learning, but we should guard what they're learning as well.