Actually Al and Mario, There is school choice and has always been school choice.
What is new is parents ask the US government to provide monies for Charter Schools, Vouchers for Charter and/or Religious Schools. Were I a Muslim or a Morman, Hare Krishna, I would not want my tax dollars with or without private funds to help pay , usurp public real estate, former public school purveyors, public land, etc. to schools that might disparage my religion, politics or whatever. Let them pay for that. The "failing schools crisis" was pushed for businessmen and politicians to revamp educational policy in order to make big money. See posts from and Jonathan Kozol I posted last week. http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com/2007/08/big-enchilada.html From: Mario Giorno <westphi...@gmail.com> Reply-To: Mario Giorno <westphi...@gmail.com> Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2012 16:42:53 -0400 To: "krf...@aol.com" <krf...@aol.com> Cc: UnivCity listserv <UnivCity@list.purple.com> Subject: Re: [UC] Citypaper article: school vouchers & the campaign against Jim Roebuck 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 Compact¹s own admission, charter schools serve English >> Language Learners at a rate of 3.3% which is less than half of the >> school district¹s average of 8.1% and less than a fourth of Lea¹s >> 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 <tel:215-349-6500> , fax 215-349-6502 <tel:215-349-6502> > krf...@aol.com or al.krig...@krf.icodat.com -- Mario Giorno 228 S. 45th Street Philadelphia, PA 19104 westphi...@gmail.com
