HOME | POLITICS | SPORTS | LIFE | SCI/TECH | OPEDS | HELPFUL TIPS
|
By Brooks A. Mick, M.D.
Mar. 21, 2006 There have been various proposals about posting hospital and physician performance numbers on the internet so that patients can choose the best hospital and the best physician for their particular problems. Makes sense to me. But when it comes to the government school system, we apply exactly the opposite approach. We don't send our students to better schools, we send more money to the bad schools! Wouldn't the approach recommended for hospitals work better? Post the performance figures on the internet, institute a school choice voucher system, and let the parents and students go to the schools with the best performance. Makes sense to me. I've written about Gammon's Law before in relation to the government school system. Gammon's Law of Bureaucracies states that the more money spent on a failing bureaucracy, the worse the performance. One can note, always, that failing governmental programs are never canceled. The response is always for those working in the failing bureaucracy to cry for more money. Just note the teachers' unions cries for more money, more teachers, more money, smaller class sizes, and ever more money! Never since the first band of cavemen formed a committee on wooly mammoth barbecuing has a government agency ever called for its own demise no matter how blatantly ineffective. I suspect that the Committee on Barbecuing Mammoths is still holding meetings somewhere. And they always, whenever their ineffectiveness is noted, claim that the reason is "underfunding." No government agency is ever overfunded...according to the government agency! I recall working on a county mental health committee in a small town in Ohio many, many years ago. They never did much and near the end fo the year it was noted that there was a huge budget surplus. Do you think perhaps they turned in the money and declared themselves useless and stopped spending taxpayer dough? No indeed! They hurriedly looked around for ways to spend that money fast so it would appear they had done something and so the money would be gone and so they could request more money! I resigned from the committee that week. ------------ About the author Brooks A. Mick: Physician, still practicing medicine but retired from the US Army. Write just for the fun of it, but working on novel in the vein of Tom Clancy's politico-military genre. Email: brooks15@cox.net Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
||||||
|
|
|||||||
|
