Al,
Hello. I think you're on to a good point. We, parents and children,
all have a right to go to the school or school type we choose to go to.
Choice is important here. Almost 150 years ago in the U.S. the choice of
schooling your children wasn't between public schools, private/charter
schools or home schooling/tutoring; it was between school or no school. The
public school system wasn't set up to give every kid a superior education
per se, but to just give them a basic education that would make them
productive in the industrial workforce. Today the shift that has taken
place in education in America has again shifted based on the need for a
proper education needed to ensure successful employment and an attainable
career path.
Sending your kids to a private school or tutor isn't the problem here.
The problem is that all of the avenues of primary and high school education
are supposed to be "good enough." All of the teachers are supposed to be
"good enough." The kids, on the other hand, aren't supposed to be "rated"
like their schools and teachers. If child 1 gets all As and child 2 gets
all Cs, Ds and Fs; it isn't by default the school or teacher's fault. YOU
CAN NOT RATE SCHOOLS AND TEACHERS BASED ON THE ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT OR
FAILURE OF THEIR STUDENTS. If you do, you are always doomed to grade the
school and/or teacher based on their worst students, which is neither an
empirically nor statistically valid assessment. It's up to school
superintendents to judge principals and schools overall and it's up to
principals and other teachers to evaluate the teachers themselves. The
teachers's job really isn't to make sure as many of their kids get As as
possible; their job is to help kids learn as much as each can individually
learn and also set them on the path of self-reliance so they will one day
be able to learn without the aid of a teacher or mentor at all. Student
assessment must be divorced from school and teacher assessment.
The next dilemma is the issue of school taxes and vouchers. We all
pay taxes as land/homeowners is a given city, town or municipality that pay
for the public schools in our community. We pay these taxes that support
public schools whether we have children in the public school system or not.
The idea is that public schools are a service that benefits the public not
just by educating the public, but also supporting an industrial/commercial
workforce that keeps the country and each small community filled with
competent workers. If a public school tries to go beyond just creating
competent workers, more power to them, but it isn't necessary. The voucher
concept essentially lets parents sending their kids to private schools to
take back some of those tax dollars normally contributing to the public
school system and redistributes them to the private school system. If
vouchers were truly to become the law of the land, you would see the public
school system begin to become bankrupted. Since private schools are usually
for-profit models of businesses rather than not-for-profit government
institutions like public schools, they don't suffer from the existence of
the public school system. The public school system doesn't suffer either so
long as everyone still pays their taxes and the voucher concept ISN'T
instituted. If a school voucher system were made legal, however, it would
seriously cripple the public school system if not destroy it in many cities
and towns across the country.
Personally I don't believe everyone deserves a college education for
free, but they do deserve a basic primary and high school education. I see
that as a basic human right, even if some of my libertarian friends do not.
The voucher system is a way of letting the haves pull more money away from
local government to send their kids to a private school they can afford,
for the most part, without getting what amounts to a tax break that helps
destroy funding for a free public education system. If this were to become
the new rule, a kind of educational elitism in America, where the rich
today like their counterparts in the 19th century, knew that their children
would have all the education they needed while the poorest 90% of the
population struggled just to learn how to read and write. It was the public
school system that did away with that educational elitism and brought more
poor and middle class children and adults into the upper echelons of the
U.S. educational system, K-12 and freshman-PhD.
Now we're back-sliding into the 19th century. The rich are getting
extremely rich the poor are getting extremely poor and a good solid
education is being put more out of reach with every passing year, because
the cost of all private primary and high school education as well as
college education is increasing beyond what most of the country can afford
to pay. The government gets encouragement from conservation and libertarian
politicians and think tanks that seem to want to help make that even more
of a reality than it already is. My guess is that they will more than
likely succeed.
I don't like that fact, but it's been happening for a couple decades
now and I see no signs that it will stop. Until someone cares enough to
care about all kids/students instead of just the one's in their own family,
education in America will continue to become too expensive and too out of
reach. Teachers will have to deal with class loads of 25, 30, 40 kids at a
time, which means they can't do any kind of rational individual assessment
of how well your son or daughter is getting the material or lesson being
taught. Your kids probably won't have hot meals or nutritious meals in
school, because they will cost too much to provide.
And if you want to know why the public school system isn't making do,
ask a teacher and he or she will tell you. They and their schools have been
devalued and damn near disenfranchised by greedy politicians and business
interests who think it's better to demonize those working for very little
to do a really important job, teaching your kids. The next time you hear
someone picking on a teacher for getting paid too much and getting their
summers off, stop them and ask them if the have even the faintest idea of
what a teacher's salary, work week or workload is like and how much college
tuition they still have to pay back. They next time someone asks why
classrooms are so overcrowded, ask you local council person, alderman or
mayor where the tax money was spent. I'll bet the school system didn't get
all of it's budgeted funding. It's easy to pull money away from public
schools if the city needs emergency funding for something else.
Look at all of the public libraries the city shut down a couple years
ago. Ten or 11 libraries were seen as an expense the city needed to
eradicate to pay for other things like police and firemen. Granted, that
isn't public school funding, but it effected the quality of education for
public school students that lived near those libraries. It's easy to take
funding away from educational purposes, because the end result or
production of education is just a human being who (hopefully) know more
than they did coming into it. There's no profit, no products or services
that can been seen and sold for money. The result, the product is your kid,
but smarter. Educated kids don't earn money or financial aid for their
schools, they don't produce, they don't close deals. Why should a municipal
government in a capitalist society support the economic cost center of a
public school system, right? Those kids need to work, right? Get a job, you
little bums, and be productive members of society! You need to work for
that first grade education!
On Thu, Apr 12, 2012 at 3:18 PM, <krf...@aol.com> wrote:
> **
>
>
> In a message dated 4/12/2012 2:52:07 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
> aroc...@gmail.com writes:
>
> I testified before City Council's Education Committee on Tuesday with
> concerns about the Great Schools Compact. One of which is that over
> 16% of Lea Elementary's students are English Language Learners. By the
> Great Schools Compact’s own admission, charter schools serve English
> Language Learners at a rate of 3.3% which is less than half of the
> school district’s average of 8.1% and less than a fourth of Lea’s
> rate.
>
> Private schools, being private, have no obligation to serve these
> students at all. The same goes for students with Special Education
> needs, students with behavior problems, students behind grade level,
> economically disadvantaged students etc. Although voucher programs are
> often under the banner of helping the most vulnerable students, what
> has been proposed is set up to provide an escape hatch to nowhere for
> them.
>
> I'm not trying to be argumentative, but want to understand your reasoning
> behind opposition to vouchers and apparently charter schools (both of which
> I, candidly, favor at the moment). Are you saying that, rather than do
> everything you can to get a good education for your kid, you shouldn't send
> him or her to a private or charter school but keep going with a public
> school out of "fairness" to those with learning disabilities, or no
> English, or no at-home discipline and role-model, etc -- given that factors
> like these may have a deleterious impact on the quality of the education?
> This seems like a "lowest common denominator" approach. It also seems like
> one of the things that drove lots of sophisticated people out of the city
> and helped create the weak education system with which we find ourselves.
>
> Your response also seems begs the question of why you think so many young
> families have paid so dearly to live in what they thought was a
> neighborhood that would let them send their kids to the Alexander School.
>
>
> *-------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *
> Alan Krigman
> KRF Management, ICON/Information Concepts Inc
> 211 S 45th St, Philadelphia PA 19104-2918
> 215-349-6500, fax 215-349-6502
> krf...@aol.com or al.krig...@krf.icodat.com
>
--
Mario Giorno
228 S. 45th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104
westphi...@gmail.com
