BOE’s power grab

After failing to properly educate CNMI children, certain leaders of the inept public school system wish to extend their gross incompetence to all CNMI private schools as well. That is, certain elements of the state board of education are set on a PSS power grab: They want to control and regulate the CNMI’s more proficient private schools.

According to an alarming Saipan Tribune story released yesterday, some government officials want to restrict our freedom of choice. Under their proposal, they–the government–would decide which private schools could operate and which could not. They would establish the certification criteria for private schools. They would control the private schools’ curriculums. They would tell parents what is good for their children.

After years of repeated failures, how dare they inject more government disasters into our private lives? This proposal is an outrage.

It is an outrage for both moral and practical reasons. On the practical side, the public school system has failed in terms of standardized test scores, “social promotion” and scandals.

The PSS has many substantial problems. Government education just does not work. And yet they would compound their failures by extending their methods into the private sphere.

On the moral side, the state is infringing upon our rights–upon our freedom of choice. They would intervene into our private affairs.
They would socialize private schools and rob them of their sacred autonomy.

The state has no business regulating and controlling private schools. They have no business depriving parents–educational customers–of their freedom of choice.

If the state controls and regulates private schools, it would certainly ruin education in the CNMI. It would stifle the private school industry and their natural, market-based initiative. State control of all educational institutions would stifle creativity and educational entrepreneurship. Next to a federal takeover, almost nothing could be more disastrous to our interests–and to freedom in the CNMI.

Government control of CNMI education would also create great divisions in our community–as we struggle against each other to politically set the standards (the curriculum, for example). Under a free market system, the parents are empowered to determine the educational standards for their children. They simply vote with their dollars. They send their children to the private school that features the curriculum of their choice. Under government control, by sharp contrast, parents could not vote with their feet or wallets; they would have no choice but to lobby against others for political control.
This would be utterly unacceptable.