Public high school students in the US ought not be required to pass standardized test exams to gradu

Because I believe that education should not be subjected to government control, I affirm today's resolution: "Resolved: Public high school students in the United States ought not be required to pass standardized test exams to graduate." The value for the round is education, because it is implicitly stated within the context of the resolution. The criterion is prevention of government monopoly, which means to restrict total government control of schools as much as possible. Contention One: The current government monopoly in the public school system is ruining education. The United States government's control of the public school system is extraordinarily strong. The state governments run public schools; after all, they are the ones who collect the tax dollars to fund such schools. John Stossel, former co-host of 20/20, 1 elaborates, "This should come as no surprise once you remember that public education in the U.S. is a government monopoly. Families send their kids to schools the government chooses. If you don't like your public school? Tough. If the school is terrible? Tough. Your taxes fund that school regardless of whether it is good or bad." This puts students and parents in a troubling dilemma. No matter what problems the school they are sending their kids to may have, they must send their student to that school; the government orders them to do so. Not attending the school gives the child the label of "truant." This enforced education is bad, but it's not anywhere as bad as the problems with the schools themselves. Sub-Point One: Government schools fail to give the students a good education. Often times, student laziness and teacher incompetence are cited as the cause of low test scores and graduation rates. However, it's pretty hard to believe that all across the nation every teacher and student is being lazy. The problem with public schools is not the teachers or administrators: it's the government. John Stossel 2 reports, "I agree. It's the schools. At the age of ten, students from twenty-five countries take the same test and American kids place eighth, well above the international average. But by age fifteen, when students from forty countries are tested, the Americans place twenty-fifth, well below the international average (see chart, page 109). In other words, the longer American kids stay in American schools, the worse they do in international competition. They do worse than kids from much poorer, less-developed countries, like Korea and Poland, which spend much less on education than the United States." For a country so advanced, the U.S.'s numbers shouldn't be so low. The U.S. shouldn't have to deal with an illiterate population of 27 million , but it does. However, this is because of the government's strict control over the schools. The government decides exactly how education runs, and this monopoly is making the students pay for it. Mark Harrison of the CATO Institute writes, "The U.S. public school monopoly is guilty of seven deadly sins: It wastes resources, discourages good teaching, inhibits parental involvement, suppresses information, stifles innovation, creates conflict and harms the poor. Just as the seven deadly sins correspond to weaknesses in human nature, the sins of public education are inherent in the nature of the existing system -- that it is controlled, operated and funded by government. The politicians and bureaucrats who control government-owned schools do not have the strong incentives or the information necessary to satisfy consumers, control costs, innovate or encourage good teaching." Sub-Point Two: The government will not change the way it operates public schools currently. Because the U.S. government is a monopoly, it will not so easily change the way it runs its schools. The government thus leaves its students in a place where they cannot remedy the situation. John Stossel 3 furthers, "Monopolies don't innovate. Why does the school year run from September to June? Because the public schools still use the farm calendar as a model of when kids should be in school. In 1830, kids needed the summer off to plant and weed the crops. Andrew Coulson, author of Market Education, points out, "Of course, we're no longer an agrarian society and so demands for schooling have changed, but public schools are not an organization that is responsive to consumer demand." No kidding. Some parents would prefer year-round schools. Today less than two percent of families get their incomes from farming. Has the education system responded? No." Not only is the problem that the U.S. government's monopolistic control is blind to innovation, but the officials in the government who run the schools are not held truly accountable. John Stossel 4 writes, "Accountability? The head of a government monopoly has the nerve to talk about accountability? Accountability is why private schools perform better. Every day they are held accountable by parents, and if they fail the kids, the school administrators lose their jobs. Government schools are accountable only to politicians. It's why almost no school is ever closed, no matter how bad it is. No one loses his job when the kids fail. It's not news that government monopolies perform poorly. The fall of the Soviet Union is not a secret. Why would we think a monopoly would work for schools?" Contention Two: Exit exams strengthen government control on schools and thus only more problems will be caused for these schools. The exit exams that are used in the United States are government mandated and created. These tests are not the mastermind of a group of educators; these exams are merely another stringent requirement the state creates for its students. Thus, requiring students to take an exit exam to graduate only strengthens the government's control of public schools; as evidenced my previous contention, more government control is the last thing that these schools need. Exit exams are only a small part of a bigger system. However, if that bigger system is bad and is causing students not to learn, then it is very obvious that using these exit exams upon students actually harms education. These exams are not a step forward for students; they are in fact another step back into monopolistic control of government schools. These standardized test exams, much like the governmental system they are under, are also largely ineffective. John Robert Warren and Eric Grodsky of the University of Minnesota report: "This same basic pattern of exit exam policy evolution has played out in a number of states. States begin by setting moderate to high standards and then spend hundreds of thousands of dollars designing exit exams that purport to hold students to these standards. In short order, however, high failure rates and much-publicized legal challenges built on inequities in states' education systems test the political will of policymakers to hold students to these standards. In the end, politics wins out over principle and the exit exam, the passing threshold, or both are altered to increase the share of students that passes the exam. In the end, most states set the bar for passing exit exams at a point that is too low to make any real difference for academic achievement or workplace preparedness but just high enough to prevent a modest number of would-be graduates from obtaining diplomas."