LAUSD: A preview of government health care three decades hence

My children are not condemned to attendance at LAUSD “schools,” so I have not been following the particulars of this controversy. But it is remarkable in several more general ways. One is the recognition that government policies, under the decades-long control of dyed-in-the-wool liberals, have essentially destroyed the schools. In that sense, the schools are not that different from other aspects of life under the control of municipal unions and liberal big-city politicians. Connected to that is the conclusion that only private initiative can clean the pedagogically toxic cesspools the schools have become. No one can predict with any assurance that they will be successful. Perhaps the infection is terminal or at least permanently debilitating. Government control, with its emphasis on political not professional criteria, has been shown again to be an expensive luxury that one cannot afford in the long term. Meanwhile, in the years of poor performance by those schools, children’s education suffers. And, if politicians are to be believed, such educational deficiencies cost us all tremendously in loss of productivity. Sort of like a litany of other government programs.

Second, it takes an institutional destruction of near-Schumpeterian scope to get government finally to call in the (private) cavalry for innovation and reform. If ObamaCare (in its public option insurance version or some other, more direct manifestation of socialized health care) becomes the law of the land, why would one assume it will not do for health care what LAUSD has done for education? By the way, I went to LAUSD schools for six years. My high school offered classes in French, Spanish, German, Russian, and Latin, along with a plethora of academic classes in science, math, history, English, and philosophy, and of non-academic classes in art, music, shop, drafting, home economics, and business skills. An excellent school. But that was, oh, some years ago, before social experimentation in forced busing and destructive new pedagogical theories driven more by ideology than common sense and experience transformed the district.

Third, when the unions and teachers cannot hold a politician as thoroughly beholden to their interests as L.A. mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is ideologically, something is up and has gone terribly wrong for them. Indeed, he not only supports this policy. He was a leader in this matter, no doubt also enhancing some personal political position in the process in this matter. And he rebuffed the union’s stalling tactics and litigation threats by daring them to come after him: “We’re not going to be held hostage by a small group of people. I’ll let you infer who I’m talking about.”