Virtually every candidate for political office claims that if we elect him, he will fix public education, and since 92% of our children attend public schools, such political promises appeal to almost everyone. Those political promises have led to a multitude of unproven education fads introduced in public school classrooms, but there is one idea that has yet to overcome political opposition: vouchers, a.k.a. school choice. There are two major sources of opposition for the idea: teachers' unions who are afraid of losing part of their funding and those who hold to free market ideals and oppose government regulations.
       Voucher supporters claim they would create competition for the public schools and thereby improve them. But columnist Charlie Reese sums it up nicely: "Government schools cannot compete in any sense of the word. They are government schools, creatures of law and politics. Faculty, its pay, and the curricula are determined not by the schools, but by politicians, bureaucrats and, in some cases judges. To state that public schools can compete with private schools is like saying a bronze statue of a horse can compete with a live one."
       In reality, public funding would destroy private education. Saralee Rhoades outlines why in The Freeman, a newsletter published by The Foundation for Economic Education:

• Private schools will become dependent on this new source of money and in time unable to exist without it.
• Private schools electing to safeguard their freedoms, not taking advantage of "free" money, will not be able to compete.
• When the only schools left are government schools, is there any assurance that the quality of public schooling will not precipitously decline as it has before? The resultant government monopoly will preclude any form of competitive standards.
• Costs will skyrocket as offices are set up nationwide to monitor the expenditure of government funds, protect students from exploitation, and expand services as further needs arise. Eventually the aim will be the maintenance of the program, not the education of children. Compliance with government policy and maintenance of the status quo will assume greater and greater importance, as more workers become dependent on government-subsidized salaries. The bottom line is that government cannot fix the educational problem because government is the problem.

• Vouchers would cause the demise of private schools because they cannot compete with what some parents will perceive as "free" schools. And government regulation will force them to be like public schools.
• Vouchers would grant the government the "right" to collect your money and redistribute it to the more needy or dictate where and how you spend it by granting you a voucher. Collecting taxes and redistributing them is socialism.
• Vouchers will cause private school tuition to escalate as witnessed by the sharp increase in public college tuition after the GI Bill was passed in 1943. Fewer parents would be able to afford true private schools.
• Vouchers would politicize private schools the same way as public schools. Dr. Gary North, president of The Institute for Christian Economics, describes how voters/parents have consented to a system that rewards educational bureaucrats rather than serving parents as consumers with legal authority over their children. The chief losers of the political scheme are the students.
• Vouchers would methodically expunge religion from private school curricula. George Bernard Shaw of The Socialist Fabian Society of England frankly stated, "Nothing will more quickly destroy independent Christian schools than state aid; their freedom and independence will soon be compromised, and before long their faith."

      It is vitally important that laws protect the traditional family's authority and dignity because the dissolution of the family is at the root of nearly all the social problems afflicting contemporary society today.
       Since the American Revolution, the family has been defined according to the "laws of nature and nature's God." Three years after the Revolution in his "Bill for Proportioning Crimes and Punishments," Thomas Jefferson made sodomy a felony subject to the same punishment as rape. Texas' sodomy law meets the standard that has protected the traditional family for centuries.
       The distinction between a man and a woman is fundamental and confining sexual relations to a man and wife is the very core of morality by which our civilization is constituted. Civilized society has always regarded protection of the traditional family the best defense against disorder and disease. The HIV virus, originally named the Gay-Related Immunodeficiency Disease (GRID), was first isolated as a disease of the homosexual community. Denial of natural law and common sense by our modern society has permitted this horrible disease (AIDS) to wreck havoc on every segment of society.
       The Texas sodomy law also protects children in public school classrooms from distorted teaching that homosexuality is natural or healthy. Textbook publishers must also adhere to the law. The statute guards innocent children from adoption by same-sex couples and it disallows deviant same-sex unions.
       Opponents have systematically targeted the law allegedly because the statute violates the "right to privacy" of active homosexuals. The U.S. Supreme Court, however, decided in 1986 by a vote of 8-1 to uphold the law's validity and constitutionality. As recently as 1994, the Texas Supreme Court also upheld the law. When the Texas Penal Code was rewritten by the legislature in 1993, attempts to remove it were denied.
       Homosexuals already have the same constitutional rights as every other American citizen. There is no evidence that the Texas sodomy law has been used to deny them jobs, housing or insurance coverage. It would be unwise to put such guarantees in the state law because they would require every person seeking a job, or housing or insurance to answer privacy-invading questions. It could also lead to a mandate for every business, including churches, to hire homosexuals. Furthermore, the recent California initiative showed that people prefer being identified by their job qualifications rather than identifiable quotas.
       A Houston incident last November when two men were fined for homosexual conduct fits the homosexual political agenda described in the book, After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90s, by Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen. "At least at the outset, we seek desensitization." Once the public is no longer shocked and repelled by homosexual behavior, "the issue of gay rights (must be) reduced, as far as possible, to an abstract social question."
       "Desensitization" has now given way to the "social question" of whether homosexuals will be given the special right to criminalize, prosecute and persecute those who live by the "laws of nature and nature's God."
Source: The Washington Times, 12/6/98

      The United States is rapidly becoming a nation where:

• "prayer monitors" patrol our public schools to prevent student prayers;
• almost-born babies are stabbed in the neck and have their brains suctioned out;
• the people of a state have no right to protect themselves from militant gay rights activists demanding special privileges for homosexuals.
• a single federal judge can double citizens' property taxes to pay for court-ordered school busing.

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      Traditional education is sometimes described as "direct instruction," because the teacher stands in front of the classroom "directly instructing" the students in the subject matter at hand. The terms "Direct Instruction" (which refers to a teaching method) and "teacher-directed instruction" (used in traditional education) are examples of how words in our language can be perceived as one in the same, when in fact they are very different from one another. Deceptive semantics has created much confusion among many educators as well as parents.
      The major difference between traditional education and Direct Instruction (DI), therefore, is the method in which the content is taught.

       Traditional education focuses on content-rich curriculum that introduces, teaches and reviews a particular subject. The content moves from simple to complex, spiraling back to refresh the students' memories of previously learned material, while progressing in that subject. Some textbook publishers make recommendations about what content is to be taught, but in most traditional education classrooms, the teacher decides how the "what" is taught.

       To help determine student achievement in traditional education, weekly quizzes and end-of-chapter tests are administered. One hundred percent mastery is not expected. The teacher knows that with time and review, both knowledge retention and test scores will improve. The object of traditional education is to offer students a broad foundation of information, based on facts and figures that will be retained for future application on high stakes assessments, education and career objectives, and lifelong wisdom.

       Direct Instruction is based on behavioral psychology and the work of American professor B. F. Skinner. DI focuses on content-rich curriculum that introduces a subject via a stimulus expecting a particular response from the student. It requires the teacher to use operant conditioning (reinforcing the desired response by a stimulus) and behavior modification techniques. In a DI classroom, the teacher must follow a prescribed set of lesson plans, sometimes in script form, and use certain cues such as clapping, with the intent to incite a certain reaction, such as unison chanting by the students. Many DI programs use rewards and tokens to generate predetermined responses.

       DI is a teaching method that bypasses the brain and causes an unnatural reflex that is controlled and programmed. This manipulation causes some students to become so stressed that they actually become ill and/or develop nervous tics. In DI, it is the method that is important, not the student.

       Many DI programs are designed for the computer, with built-in bells and whistles to control the pace and learning outcomes. With OBE already in many schools, Computer-Assisted Learning (CAL) is also promoting affective/subjective goals.

       The DI method expects students to achieve mastery in each area of instruction before moving on to the next level (mastery learning). Teachers teach to the test, and students are told what to expect. Since students know in advance what material they will be tested on, much important content is skipped over.

       Testing is frequent and skills are drilled to perfection, so scores are usually high in the early years of DI. Typical classrooms, however, consist of students of varying abilities so the amount of content is decreased to accommodate the slowest learner. In some schools, cooperative learning is used to appease the high achievers. Since review of previously learned material is not encouraged, overall retention of information is less. SAT scores are low, and the ultimate application of knowledge is not achieved, and in some cases, stifled.