OK, I’ll give this a try. It’s only 90 today, and surprisingly, that’s made an enormous difference in my comfort level, enough so that I will endeavor to continue my enjoyable argument with Scylla.
I said something about Scylla having to be kidding about school vouchers being not driven by the two great motivators (according to me) of the Replublican party: benefits for the wealthy and/or reduction of civil liberties in support of either ultra-religiousness or misguided patriotism or both (and of course, the ultimate, which is the promotion of the Republican party at any cost).
[QUOTE=Scylla]
For the wealthy, no. I beleive you are mistaken. One of the great inequities is that the public schools tend to be pretty decent in wealthy areas. If you’ll recall the program would only provide vouchers for schools that failed to meet certain performance criteria. Vouchers would typically be available in less wealthy areas since those tend to be the ones with poor schools.
[/QUOTE]
OK, this was NOT my understanding (about vouchers being provided only where schools weren’t meeting certain criteria - in fact, that’s the absolute first I’ve ever heard that idea), and I don’t know off-hand which of us is correct, but we’ll assume it’s you for the moment. If so, then yes, it’s a decent thing for the people, but it pretty much destroys any hopes of bringing those public schools up to snuff. The other thing you have to understand, and I seriously doubt that you do, because it’s pretty evident that you made a tidy little bundle on Wall Street and then retired to a farm in PA, is that tax breaks are virtually useless to the extremely poor. I’m not quite certain how the voucher system is supposed to work - if it means that people can apply for a coupon that would actually cover the tuition on a local private school, then yes, it would be useful to a poor family. But a really poor family is NEVER going to have the money to pay for a private school, even the Catholic ones, which admittedly are less expensive than other private schools and certainly better quality than the local public schools in my area at least. Lots of non-Catholic lower middle class families do in fact send their kids to Catholic school here in Trenton, and I don’t blame them one bit. I imagine that a break from paying school taxes for them would be very welcome. But it makes the possibility that Trenton public schools can ever hope to improve almost nil, because they will have even less funding than they do now.
I’m jumping ahead to some of the points you made later in your post here, but you have a very distorted idea of urban areas, at least in the fading industrial North East. You think they have plenty of funding? Think again. This city is mostly poor, dirt poor. There are very few wealthy folks in Trenton, and I would imagine that Trenton is fairly typical of a city of its size in this general geographical area. Actually, it’s probably a bit better off than most, because at least it is the state capitol, providing a fairly decent job base. Of course, the pay from the state is beans, but it’s a lot better than no job at all, and the benefits, although not what they once were, are pretty good, at least comparable to a GOOD corporation (and better than a bad one). But the majority of people around here who work at all work at hourly jobs with no benefits, no sick time, no vacation, etc. And a lot of people in this area can’t find work at all.
Basically, rather than argue each point, I’ll just say this. You have it firmly embedded in your mind as an article of as deep faith as the Pope (hopefully) has in God that anything run by the government is automatically far less efficient than anything done by a corporation. You also have the idea that government employees, believing themselves to be firmly set in their jobs for life, saunter through their jobs doing a little work when they find it amusing to do so.
I can’t convince you otherwise, because nothing I tell you is going to permeate that belief. The fact is that people are people everywhere; some are going to work incredibly hard, some are going to slide through on the minimum they can get away with. You were, I gather, a stock broker, which is a very high-profile job where not exceeding the already extremely high expectations they have of you is pretty much grounds for firing. But that’s not how most of corporate America is. In the majority of positions, they’re every bit as afraid to fire someone as they are in the state. If the employee is not performing up to their expectations, they have to document up the wazoo what they’ve done to inform the employee and direct his or her efforts better. After some six or eight months of non-improvement, they MAY feel sufficiently comfortable to fire someone, assuming they’ve been documenting and informing, informing and documenting. I think many of the periodic corporate lay-offs exist as much to give managers an opportunity to fire the people they either don’t like or feel aren’t performing as they do to actually cut the budget, because it’s not nearly as likely that a person could sue for being laid off as it is for being fired.
You were, I gather, in a very high stress job, in which your performance and the performance of the company overall were very closely linked. Again, this is NOT the typical situation. In most corporate jobs, it’s exactly the same as a government job. There is a monolithic entity out there who may or may not benefit from the work you do, and who pretty much arbitrarily decides whether or not you will get a raise or a bonus or nothing. Lip service is paid to the concept of ‘merit raises,’ but the fact is that most people get very close to the same percentage, regardless of their performance. Promotions appear to be based most closely on who plays the political game the best. There is little to no identification with the company as an entity in whose well-being you take a sincere interest, and quite often, the company’s end product is one you’d just as soon see removed from the market entirely, if truth were told. What I’m trying to tell you here is that for most of us, there is absolutely NO difference in what our performance would be in a job for a corporation versus a job doing the same thing for the government. It’s only at the highest levels that this changes, and even then, I suspect it’s just a matter of the rewards being different - in a corporation you get million dollar bonuses, and in government, you get enormous status that may translate into a high-level appointment or an elected position.
The majority of teachers, oddly enough, DO identify with their schools and want desperately for them to succeed, especially the ones in the poorest areas where the teachers tend to be rather idealistic or altruistic. The reason the kids generally do better in the Catholic schools is first and foremost because their parents are the kind of people who send them to a Catholic school! You say that it’s not the kid’s responsibility, but I say bullshit. It IS the kid’s responsibility to try to do well in school, and in families that care about their kids’ education, this is so automatic that you don’t even recognize it. The inner city schools not only get the poorest of the poor, they get the most indifferent of the indifferent; children who not only have never really known someone personally who did well because of education, but whose parents have never known someone like that either.
Note here that when I’m talking about really poor people, I’m NOT talking about the college grad who has chosen a very low paying field because that’s what they really want to do. I’m talking about the multi-generational poor, the ones who have virtually NO exposure to anything but the lives they and their immediate peers live. And here, societal trends in the past fifty years have been distinctly unfortunate. Probably when Ronald Reagan was a young man, it was truly possible for a dirt poor kid to work his way up to the top. Education was still viewed pretty universally with respect, and children were expected to try to do as well as they could. Things have changed a lot. There are plenty of people living in the ghettos who flash cars, clothes, and jewelry that cost far more than I would ever consider paying for those things, and I make a pretty decent living. How? Drugs, mostly. Thanks almost solely to their illegality, there is a fortune to be made in the distribution of drugs, and plenty of kids who recognize that this is a comparatively easy way of getting ready cash. Sure, there’s risk and illegality involved, but what kid truly thinks about risk, and many of these kids simply are indifferent to legality. After all, what has the ‘system’ ever done for them?
Their parents are different too. I’m guessing you’re about five-ten years younger than I (I’m just 50), and I’m the youngest of some widely spread children, so my parents grew up during the depression. My mom lives, and lives fairly comfortably, on $15-$20 K a year. Part of that is due to a subsidized senior apartment complex, but most of it is that she knows how to use (and not use) her money. Still, that social security that you so scorn is what keeps my mother eating, and this despite the fact that she worked full time almost her entire life. Sure, she MIGHT have done better investing that extra paycheck money it in the market herself. Just as likely, she would have lost it entirely. And then what?
But I digress. Today’s kids’ parents among the very poor don’t know how to stretch a penny six different ways. They don’t even know that they SHOULD. They just know that occasionally they have a surplus, which generally goes to buying something obscenely expensive for their kids that “all the other kids have,” and usually they have less than they need to meet this month’s bills. Tax benefits are almost useless to them, because they pay almost nothing in taxes as it is. What they WANT is a large sum of money to let them catch up, and which will (in their minds) then allow them to keep up in the future. What they NEED is a complete culture change, so that they are more like my parents were. I don’t know how to do that. Do you?
So vouchers? If they aren’t going to be subsidizing Mr. and Mrs. Ultrarich Ashton-Clarke the Third’s little Muffie going to the most pretigious private kindergarten in the area instead of the perfectly adequate public school down the street, they’re a nice little benefit for the middle class. But one that will be highly damaging to the public schools, which whether you can accept it or not, are ALL struggling financially, and NOT because Mr. Lazy-ass Do-nothing Superintendent gets 3 months a year paid vacation. Do you actually KNOW any teachers? I do. Very few of them get summers off, and their day sure as hell doesn’t end at 3, even though some of the kids go home then.
But under-funding isn’t the worst of the problems with the inner cities schools. It’s just a bad one that vouchers would make even worse. The worst problem is the environment and the culture in which they’re trying to educate students. And it’s not the kids’ fault either, or even their parents’, or rather, it is, but it’s understandable. They come from a culture that sees no value in education, and that mocks those who try to get one. Very few kids are going to push themselves to try in that situation, and their parents are mostly either too indifferent or too damned busy (with hourly jobs, it’s probably going to take two or even three a day to support a family) to be able to provide the necessary support.
OK, I’m out of steam now. I’ll continue this tomorrow. I’m sorry, Scylla but it’s the best I can do for now. Better than yesterday or not, it’s still 90 degrees.
Fondly,
Oy!
I’m just too hot, and too tired (and sometimes too dizzy).