Grover Norquist is Right

So I'm sitting at home last night catching up on Tivoed episodes of The Daily Show, and come upon Tuesday night's interview with uber government-hater Grover Norquist, who was flogging his new book. He tried to be funny--a fatal mistake when you're a guest on a comedy show--and then offered a bunch of lame generalities about how government steals our liberty etc. etc. blah blah. His one example of bad government: The DC Public Schools.

And here's the thing: Grover Norquist is wrong, spectacularly so, about a great many things. If there was a modern Mt. Rushmore of wrongness, his bearded, roundish mug would be on it. He's a living example of how, if you push your wrong ideas with sufficient zeal and bad faith, one man can make the world a worse place for all of us. He also knows nothing about education--he thinks we should "simply" voucherize the schools, and in denouncing government monopolies, he says that DC has only one system of public education, when in fact 30 percent of all public school students in DC, where he lives, are enrolled in an alternate system of public charter schools.

BUT--he's entirely correct to say that the DC Public Schools spend a great deal of money, $14,000 per student, and don't spend it well. If you take a close look at the system, you'll find that every Norquistian cliche about incompetence, bureaucracy, and wasted resources is more or less true. He's not exaggerating. Which just goes to show that low-performing schools are not just a waste of money and a profound moral failure given the high stakes for disadvantaged children. They also undermine public education generally, indeed they undermine public everything generally.

This seems like a pretty reliable test: if Norquist is right, something is really, really wrong. All the more reason to hope that Mayor Fenty and Chanchellor Rhee's efforts to finally turn the DC schools around bear fruit.