A classic definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting to get a different result each time.
According to Patrick Byrne, most Utahns are insane because they rejected school vouchers in the November election. Byrne is the CEO of Overstock.com and one of the people who bankrolled the program that would take money away from the worst-funded school system in the nation and given it to rich people to put their kids in private schools.
Byrne, who said on election night that Utahns failed an IQ test because they saw through the “school choice” blarney and voted down the vouchers, amended that statement in a recent op-ed piece in The Salt Lake Tribune. He said Utahns failed a sanity test because they have chosen to stick with a public school system he claims only produces ill-educated students.
(This is also the same Byrne who said that minorities who can’t cut it in school should be burned.)
Actually, Byrne and those who support vouchers are the ones who are fitting the definition of insanity attributed to Albert Einstein.
Ever since this harebrained idea was proposed, Utahns have said in no uncertain terms that they do not want public money spent in private schools. Opinion polls over the past seven years demonstrated that the public doesn’t think the solution to an overpopulated underfunded school system is to cut its funding. They know that vouchers would only make the problem worse and create a greater gap between the haves and have-nots.
Utahns also knew that there was no guarantee that private schools would be better. In all likelihood, they could be worse as some would be ideologically driven, with students indoctrinated more than educated.
Referendum 1 was the ultimate statement from the people of Utah that this is a bad idea, and that the state needs to work on improving the public schools, not privatize them. A sane, sensible person would heed that message and change tack.
But not Byrne, nor the misleadingly named Parents for Choice in Education or the editorial board of the Daily Herald, which made a collective fool of itself by printing daily pro-voucher editorials for three weeks before the election and, even now, continues to bang the voucher drum. They know the people are against vouchers, yet they will insist on pushing for them.
That is insanity.
