School as a Right Is Truly Wrong

Wrong for students and society

Many people have become so inured to the idea of government schools that not only do they ignore or malign alternatives but also they fail to realize the very real harms wrought by such schools and the believed and/or codified notion that they are rights everyone deserves. Unfortunately, many states’ constitutions enshrine such rights, which create an ossified structure for the maltreatment of young people.

Before I address several specific harms of this system, I want to deal with the notion of a “right,” one of the most popular terms in common parlance. The standard definition of this word seems to center on what someone deserves simply by virtue of his or her existence or location, as in the examples of a right to healthcare or a right to education for all Americans. Unfortunately, proponents of this definition fail to recognize the inherent problem in such superficially laudable slogans: Who provides these things, and what if they don’t want to?

Let’s apply that question to healthcare. Who provides it? Doctors, nurses, and other health professionals—in other words, people. So, if I have a right to healthcare, then I have a right to have a person provide that for me. However, can I also then use force to compel someone to provide said service for me? After all, it’s my right. Does that also mean I can go straight to the front of the line in an emergency room or not pay for an operation? It’s my right, right?

Notice the same reasoning applies to schooling. If it is a right, then I can compel someone to teach me or my children. I also cannot be forced to pay for schooling because it is a right.

Hopefully, this brief tutorial on the ridiculousness of rights based on forcing other people to do something is sufficient to at least encourage you to consider the idea that such rights are inherently problematic and potentially akin to slavery of others in service of my “rights.” For a deeper discussion of rights, I recommend Murray Rothbard’s excellent essay on property rights.

With the basic notion of school as a right now undermined, I turn hereafter to address several of the pernicious effects of government schools and the associated belief in them as a right in order to argue why alternatives to these schools are so important for parents and students to consider.

Send Us Your Unruly, Violent, and Disruptive Youths, Yearning to Break Free

Perhaps the most significant effect of schooling as a right is that all students are accepted in government schools, regardless of their motivations, desires, or abilities to refrain from harming others. If nothing else, I would expect that government school personnel could at least keep students relatively safe from violence, but that is certainly not the case.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, “in 2019, about 5 percent of students ages 12–18 reported that they had been afraid of attack or harm at school during the school year, which is higher than the percentage of students (3 percent) who reported that they had been afraid of attack or harm away from school during the school year.” (Emphasis added)

Additionally, “70 percent of public schools recorded one or more violent incidents, whereas 32 percent reported one or more incidents to sworn law enforcement. The same was true for serious violent incidents (25 vs. 14 percent), thefts (32 vs. 15 percent), and other incidents (57 vs. 36 percent).”

Perhaps most surprisingly to me, from 2017 to 2019, there were 915,400 nonfatal, violent victimizations of students aged 12–18 away from schools but 1,656,300 such incidents at schools—nearly twice as many violent incidents at versus away from schools.

Consider that item for a moment. Students spend roughly one third of their day at school, yet the number of violent incidents for young people during that one third was twice as large as the number of such incidents during the other two thirds of the day. Perhaps someone can investigate that inequality.

Moreover, since 2001, the number of such victimizations at school has generally surpassed the number away from school each year, save for 2020 and 2021 during the lockdown-related school closures. And during those years, despite school closures, the actual number of victimizations of students away from school declined from 2019 to 2020 and again from 2020 to 2021, which may raise questions about homeschooling opponents’ concerns about rapid increases in abuse away from school.

Further, when students do aggress against others in school, it is difficult if not sometimes legally impossible to remove them from the school environment due to government regulations. Specifically, for students with individualized education plans (IEPs), expulsion or even placement changes are difficult because of the doctrine of least restrictive environment and the associated legal issues district personnel will face should they run afoul of the convoluted discipline guidelines set forth by the states and federal government. Indeed, even in cases in which students with IEPs are temporarily removed from the classroom after violent assaults on other students or teachers, the district usually must still supply those students with special services, so the students often simply return to the original classroom. Additionally, if violent behavior is determined to be the result of a student’s disability, then that student likely cannot be expelled from school.

For example, in a local elementary school, a second-grade student with an IEP attacked another student with scissors, stabbing him in the head. Although the injured student needed to be hospitalized, the aggressing student returned to the class the next day. Similarly, a first-grade student needed to be physically restrained several times per week, sometimes by two adults, yet this situation persisted for months without any changes in the student’s placement, mainly because district personnel feared legal repercussions for over-disciplining this student.

And, although most districts do offer alternative placements/settings for students with behavioral or other issues, these placements are frequently overfilled. Offerings such as partial-hospitalization or alternative-education programs may have waiting lists months long, as in the case of one district near me wherein these programs’ waiting times are nearly a full school year—thus rendering their effectiveness somewhat moot.

Certainly, the above statistics and anecdotes do not reflect every student’s experience every day at school; however, they still demonstrate a serious and omnipresent problem with government schools. When no standards of admission (except for vaccine requirements, of course) exist and requirements for expulsion are often unrealistically demanding, such violent incidents are inevitable. Imagine if the same standards were applied to your property: Everyone could use it, and excluding people was nearly impossible. Do you envision a rosy outcome to such a scenario? Now, apply that to millions of young people, many of whom want nothing more than to not go to a school each day, and we can see how this system will quite naturally lead to violence. When students are essentially forced to spend time in a location that significantly increases their risk for violence and that is funded via the threat of violence, I think it is worth noting that system’s failures and actively working to undermine it.

Overuse of the System

Another malign effect of school as a right is that people will overuse the system—the so-called tragedy of the commons. Government school has artificially low prices (via forced taxation of everyone in a given area), so demand is also artificially high (and is compounded by mandatory school laws). Because parents do not pay anywhere near the full cost of schooling for their children, they have reduced incentives to keep costs low, so they will tend to accept more from and demand more of the system. In a previous article, I noted that the average annual per-pupil cost of government school in the United States is a bit more than $16,000; does anyone you know pay anywhere near that amount in school taxes (and consider that number is for only one student)?

This sequence of events leads to waste (teachers are encouraged to find ways to spend rather than refund their budgeted funds), unnecessary handouts (bag lunches and breakfasts for all students during Covid-lockdown-mandated half days), and special services (some students have personal aides who take notes for them and prompt them during class to stay on task). Note that all of these parenthetical examples come from my own experience as a teacher.

When deciding whether to utilize such a service for their children, what incentive do parents have to say no or to even be circumspect about the service and its cost? After all, the parents do not solely and immediately pay for the aide or the bag lunch or the department’s budget. Their school taxes may rise by a nominal amount each year, but the tens of thousands of dollars in salary and benefits for additional teachers and staff are spread across all taxpayers, so parents have every incentive to use as much of the system as they can. Is the district offering “free” laptops to students? Might as well take one. That bus that passes our house each morning? Might as well have my child ride that instead of driving him or her myself. It’s much more convenient and doesn’t directly cost me.

And lest you think I am being uncharitable in my assumptions above, when I asked a neighbor why he waits in his car at the end of the street for the school bus to come along and pick up his daughter even though the school is only half a mile away, he told me, “It’s convenient for us. I’d have to change my schedule if I were going to drive [my daughter] to school every day.” I suppose he did not notice that he was already in the car, with the motor running, waiting for roughly the amount of time it would take to get to the school and back. Perhaps he would feel differently about that half mile if he had to directly pay $10 per day (or roughly $1,500 per year), which is the per-pupil cost in my district for transportation services. Or perhaps not, but the point is that parents right now are insulated from these true costs and thus are not making decisions to use or not use the school system based on weighing costs and benefits. Rather, they are basing their decisions on aspects such as the convenience to themselves, subsidized involuntarily by others.

Speaking of convenience, it is also noteworthy that most districts offer an array of after-school activities, such as fitness clubs for younger students. Because these activities are seemingly “included” in the cost of school, many parents use them for one of the same purposes for which they use the main school day—babysitting. Never mind that students may be aggressed against or that their desire to learn is slowly wrung out of them by the coercion of the system or that they may not even want to partake in said activities. For instance, a teacher shared with me that she witnessed numerous times young students at an after-school program crying and saying they did not want to be there. But, hey, two thumbs up for convenient childminding services.

In another real example of abusing the system, many students accrue so-called lunch debt when they fail to pay for school lunches at the point of purchase. However, due to various state and federal laws, these students are still entitled to a lunch, albeit sometimes an “alternate” one. How exactly being forced to accept an apple instead of an orange discourages students and their parents from continuing to rack up debts is unknown. Then again, perhaps lunch is now also a right, so why should anyone pay for it in the first place?

Conclusion

Quite simply, rights cannot be predicated on others’ activity or work. Such rights would entail slavery, so they are baseless ethically and legally. Although saying people have a right to education may engender fuzzy feelings and create meme-worthy slogans, it actually perpetuates a system that causes real harm via theft, violence, and abuse and interferes with private, voluntary solutions that could (and are) actually meet students’ diverse needs.

The truth of coercive government schools is quite different from the rah-rah façade of Friday-night football games and elementary school Christmas concerts. That truth is founded on a misplaced sense of entitlement, funded with theft via the threat of violence, and formed to provide one-size-fits-none “education” that often does more harm than good to the very students it purports to serve.

Thankfully, there is a light at the end of this tunnel, though, in the form of a panoply of educational options for all types of learners. I discussed several of these options in a previous article, and I will detail even more in articles to come; in the meantime, I hope all readers, especially parents of school-age children, will begin investigating and using alternative learning options.

This leviathan government school system will not end on its own, but if we deprive it of funding and fodder in the form of our children, it will crumble like any neglected structure and make way for new, voluntary, peaceful learning for all students.