Andersen

Davyn Andersen
Jeffrey Craig Greenwell
English 1010
October 30th, 2014
The Preservation of the Public Sector and Its Regulations
One aspect of our country that is in need of definite reform, without a doubt, is our
educational system. As of 2013, the United States has continued to decrease in its educational
rankings on a global scale, falling well below over 20 other industrial countries. The recent
statistics of each year continue to display a decrease in the average American students abilities
to comprehend math and science, and also showed poor literacy. When our country attempts to
correct this outcome of an increasingly deficient educational system, many of those who are
usually of a conservative stance give blame to both teachers unions and the public sector. They
are often have a desire to instill a private educational system, usually incorporating school
vouchers, to remedy the situation. Those originating of a commonly liberal viewpoint will then
countervail the argument with their own rhetoric, justly moving the direction of blame from the
educators and unions to the fact that our taxes are lacking focus on the educational system itself,
with other persuasive items of argument, such as the important aspects of teachers unions, to
follow. Looking from a perspective that focuses on how are taxes are being alocated is a valid
point to use in a debate, as according to our 2013 federal tax receipt only 2.85% of our tax
dollars were used for education, compared with the 24.79% that went to national defense. This is
where I arrive at my thesis: The majority of our public sector programs are not in need of a
change to the private sector, as long as they are properly funded by our tax dollars; and the
private sector most likely would not improve on what our public system already accomplishes, if

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not just profit from it while maintaining its inadequacy by cutting spending and corners through
deregulation.
To expand further on possible future deregulations that might occur and how they could
negatively change the educational system alone, we can look at the fact that a number of private
schools are actually replacing teachers with technology. They will use a computer program to
inefficiently educate too many students at one time, all to reduce their own costs in giving an
education, while receiving the same, if not more, amount of revenue that a public school gains
from our taxes, which also all together lacks the common and important management given by
educators that are is in a disposition where they can effectively instruct a proper number of
students. Not only will this cause many educators to lose their jobs, but also a student is at a
higher risk to get lost in a larger crowd of fellow students to an uncaring and under-supervised
program. This should give an inkling that most regulation is created or exists for a reason, and
does not need to be removed in most cases. We should not allow our standardseducational or
otherwiseto lower simply in due of a factions ambition to cut spending and exploit the
situation for their own profit, especially on such an important issue. In stead, we should
prioritize where our taxes are going. So, with that being said, it is now necessary to center on
wasted funds. And their would be no better way to do that than to arrive back to the 24.79% of
our taxes that go to national defense, which I mentioned early, and make apparent what the
privatized portions of our military have been doing with a large percentage of our tax dollars.
To paraphrase an editorial article in the New York Times, which was posted in
September of 2011, waste has added up to $31 billion to $60 billion dollars of the $206 billion
dollars given over to private contractors for operations in Afghanistan. The majority of this
monetary loss arrives from these private contractors being awarded large sums of money with

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very poor to little results for what they have been contracted to do, which often amount to both
fraud and mayhem. Over 260,000 private contractors have been sent to both Iraq and
Afghanistan, and with the knowledge of these insufficient outcomes caused by them, it has been
argued as a practice that needs to be reduced. The contracts need to be more scrutinized and
competitive, as well, to make certain they end up with reliable individuals who can perform their
jobs to full expectation. Irresponsible war contractors have been also giving 20% of the value of
their contracts to our enemies. The contractors actually pay this amount out to warlords existing
in the area in which they both operate as an incentive for protection. The article ends by
contending that the government needs to monitor and suspend if necessary many of the private
contractors that have performed malfeasance, and have acted poorly in their duty (N.Y. Times)
To show more responsibility on our own part, our country needs to stop funding the actions of
these unreliable private contractors, which would then lower the percentage of taxes that go to
the military. In result, we could redirect the saved funds from cutting these irresponsible private
contractors to our public school system, making certain the education of our population takes
more priority. And we could also make certain that the taxes that are still going to our military
maintain a better education to our actual military personnel, who could then perform the job
functions that the private contractors did so poorly, if those in the military are not already
actually very capable of doing.
To return and make more dubious the motivations of the proponents for the privatization
of our educational system, we can examine their excessive blame of the teacher unions for the
dysfunction of the program, and explain the importance of teacher unions and what they do
counter to pro-privatizations argument. In regards to an opposing perspective to teachers unions,
a conservative argument will often state that teachers unions are blocking out much of the

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needed reform, that the unions protect the jobs of underperforming teachers, and that private
schools are achieving more successful students. Teachers are not making large sums of money
from their occupations, despite what information is propagated by rightwing stories. To address
the idea that teachers unions exist mostly to protect bad teachers from losing their jobs, we
must understand that the system should be viewed more faulty than any educator: The teachers
unions protect a teachers First Amendment Rights. They allow a teacher not to be removed for
refusing to teach subjects that appeal to only certain factions of the population, and hold no
bearing in necessary education. And a teacher cannot be subject to dismissal for wanting to add
new and reasonable items to their curriculum (Rawls). For these reasons, this may threaten a
standpoint of conservative values, as they usually coalesce with a Christian stance, inspiring
those who do not desire children to be taught information contradictory to their thoughts, such as
the Theory of Evolution or Sex Education, among other subjects which may go against their
religious ideals, to fear how their child is being educated. Without teachers unions the separation
of church and state might be undermined, which is most likely a sought for outcome to those
from the rightwing of politics. Therefore, they will exaggerate and ignore certain facts to make
teachers appear to be the complete source of their students failures. The true fault should
actually be found in government funding and the higher educational standards of teachers. I have
already written of the percentage of taxes that actually go to education, so I will not reiterate
those points again; but, to give my reasoning more ground, I will now add the fact that
Universities and Colleges in the United States actually have very low standards for passing
future educators. In an article on Huffington Post that focused on teacher preparation, who
placed their source as the National Council of Teacher Quality, there is an explanation of how
the curriculum of a teachers education really doesnt meet the level of it should. It states that

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there is an incredible ease to the courses that a prospective educator has to go through, which
actually awards them overinflated grades, despite not truly matching the more rigorous process
of other educational programs. Some reformers actually want to create something similar to the
Bar exam for future educators, which would hopefully higher the grade of teacher introduced
into the school system (Resmovitz). Given this information, I would rather declare that
technically its not the teachers to blame, but our low regulation of a thorough teacher
preparation, along with little tax funding to education, that is indicative of Americas poor
academic disposition. The teacher unions should not be central to blame for the current state of
student performance, and believing privatization will solve the issue is nave, as a private school
is going to receive the same, if not worse, teachers that originated from our faulty system.
Another important point to make is that the most powerful proponents for a privatized
educational system actually are individuals who have gained large sums of money from a
technological industry, and would like to further profit by replacing many teachers with
computerized programs. Successful computer developers like Bill Gates and Michael Dell are
among those who actually finance and push for reform and privatization (Fang). There is a
complete conflict of interest existing in this regard, as simply investing money to push for reform
that will supply their technology to public schools is not and most likely wont necessarily
benefit students.
To leave education for the moment, I would like to supply some short information on
another government run entity that is often debated to be in need of privatization, which is the
U.S. Post Office. The U.S. Office in its recent years has been extremely financially unsuccessful.
In April to June of 2014, it lost $2 billion within those three months (Nawaguna). But, in all
reasonability, the fault is not in the hands of those who run the U.S. Post Office. All blame can

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be pointed to our Congress, which in 2006 mandated that the U.S. Post Office place away
billions of dollars for their future retirees. Risking the possibility of making myself look like a
conspiracy theorist, its almost as if this were a plan in which the U.S. Post Office could be
dismantled from the inside that was created by our Republican elected officials, who often speak
of privatizing the entity. Currently, Post Master General Patrick R. Donahoe has been pleading
for Congress to actually update some of the U.S. Post Offices legislative provisions (USPS).
The coveted mail industry might be in the progress of being usurped by half of a bipolar
government operation, which wishes to profit from its privatization.
To finish my thoughts, in my previous essay, I admitted to discovering when
privatization is sought as a means to save a financially ruined organization. There are instances
where a town or entity has gone bankrupt, and the best option was to give it over to private
entrepreneurs that could restructure it and raise it from its disastrous state. This can result in
financial success for sometime, even though records show that eventually many of these
privatized companies cut too many cost, leading them back to financial loss. (To mention an item
again from the previous essay, one can look at the history of British Oil for an example of this.)
(Porter) But there are too many entities that are in the hands of our government that need to be
completely regulated and not corrupted by privatization: our education system, our military, and,
though not mentioned in the body of this essay, our prison systems. There is a great paradox
here: our government isnt running their organizations as well as they should, which is inspiring
people to seek private ownership of them, but that is only because many of those seeking private
ownership are actually running half of our government. Our public sector doesnt need to be
privatized; our public sector needs proper funding and regulation.

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Citation:
The New York Times Editorial. Runaway Spending on War Contractors. The New York Times.
17 Sept. 2011. Web. 16 Nov. 2014.
Rawls, Kristin. 6 Reasons Teachers Unions Are Good for Kids. AlterNet. nd. Web. 16 Nov.
2014.
Resmovitz, Joy. Teacher Training Is a Ridiculously Easy Way to Ace College, Report Says.
Huffington Post. 12 Nov. 2014. Web. 16 Nov. 2014.
Fang, Lee. How Online Companies Bought American Schools. The Nation. 16 Nov. 2011. Web.
16 Nov. 2014.
Nawaguna, Elvina. The Post Office Lost $2 Billion in Just the Last 3 Months. Huffington Post.
11 Aug. 2014. Web 16 Nov. 2014.
United States Post Office. Post Master Urges Prompt Action by Congress. United States Post
Office. 13 Feb. 2013. Web 16 Nov. 2014.
Porter, Eduardo. When Public Outperforms Private in Services. The New York Times. 15
January 2013. Web. 29 October 2014.