Mitt Romney’s Education Doomsaying and “Plan” Irrelevant to South Dakota

In his latest speeches on education, Mitt Romney is promulgating the bogus crisis rhetoric that motivated Governor Dennis Daugaard's really bad education reform plan, House Bill 1234. Mitt Romney declares a "national emergency" in education. He says that my colleagues and I are giving kids a "third-world education."

And if things are so bad, that must justify redistributing your tax dollars up the chain from our common public schools to the pockets of corporate education privatizers. Romney doesn't want to increase federal funding for education; he just wants to voucherishly hand those dollars to parents and let them in turn hand those dollars to charter and private schools.

Please understand how irrelevant Romney's rhetoric and plan are to South Dakota:

1. South Dakota's public schools do not provide a third-world education. Third-world wages, maybe, but our test scores are great. South Dakota's K-12 schools face no emergency in quality.
2. South Dakota already has school choice. Whiney schools like Madison may not like it, but parents are free to enroll their kids in any public school they want here.
3. Most South Dakota parents wouldn't have any place to take vouchers. A handful of South Dakota communities can support private schools. I would suggest that roughly 90% of our school districts are too small to support splitting their public system into new charter schools and lack the local market and income to start private schools with competitive student opportunities and teacher wages.
4. South Dakota parents wouldn't get enough money from the Romney plan to afford any private alternative. Nationally, federal dollars make up just over 10% of total school funding. Welfare state South Dakota gets a larger share, over 16%, of its K-12 dollars from Uncle Sam. Even at that rate, federal education revenue per student in South Dakota is about $1600. Tuition at Sioux Falls O'Gorman is about $4000 (plus another $700 if you're not Catholic). The poor families Romney wants to help would still have to give up a month's wages, probably more, to seek an alternative to the pretty good education they're already getting for free at Roosevelt, Lincoln, Washington, or Harrisburg.

Don't be fooled, South Dakotans: Mitt Romney has nothing to offer you or your kids on education.

Update 07:57 CDT: Pay no attention to the rich guys behind the curtain—TruthOut's Dan Archer and Adam Bessie see Romney's hyperbolic wolf-shouting on education as sleight-of-mouth to keep us from seeing the issues that would cream him in Election 2012:

And the cause of this emergency? It's not the foreclosure crisis, persistent unemployment, nor the 21 percent childhood poverty rate - after all, the multimillionaire, who made $27 million in 2010, is "not very concerned about the very poor," as they're already taken care of. Rather, this grave civil rights injustice has been inflicted by excessively powerful "special interests" and "union bosses" that put their needs in front of the poor, minority children. And Romney plans to be the 1 percent's very own Martin Luther King Jr., a "champion of real education reform in America."

Welcome to other side of the looking glass, and into the Bizarro world of so-called "education reform" - an upside-down universe in which up is down, left is right and multimillionaire CEOs are civil rights heroes championing social justice, while public school teachers are corrupt fat cats, maintaining a status quo which oppresses students in poverty and racism [Dan Archer and Adam Bessie, "The Disaster Capitalism Curriculum: The High Price of Education Reform (Episode I)," TruthOut.org, 2012.05.31].

Eight years of an MBA President didn't "fix" education or much of anything else. Romney's avoidance of real problems and real solutions shows he wouldn't do any better.