Public School Reform More Heated than Tanning Salons

Across the country, the mainstream media and tabloid outlets are screaming about the alleged abuse of Patricia Krentcil of Nutley, an overly tan New Jersey mother who let her young daughter steam in a tanning bed. The New Jersey legislature has already criminalized the use of tanning beds by minors, as did my home state last year.  Yet the liberal majority and media in the Garden state, the Golden State (no pun intended), and throughout the nation have ignored the deleterious effects of a more dangerous machine, one that daily drains the life out of our children, all in the professed aim of preparing them for adulthood: the public school system.

Governor Christie and like-minded staff are steamed up about this more heated yet less vetted matter of public education. They have properly identified the declining quality of our schools as a combination of teachers’ unions’ resistance to reform, school boards’ growing and unsustainable burden of pensions and health care benefits to public school teachers, and parents’ frustration in subsidizing poor schools with their own tax dollars, coupled with their incapacity to choose the best education for their children.

Instead of damning the pretended abuse of one parent bronzing her daughter in a tanning salon, the voters of New Jersey and in the rest of the country ought to demand that the media train its attention on the reforms touted by Governor Christie: scholarships for children in poor neighborhoods, the expansion of charter schools, and the end of teacher tenure.