Hey, I’m not against private schools. I’m not even against private religious schools.
What I AM against is the idea that we can fund these schools with private money… while NOT HOLDING THEM to the same standards and requirements as we do the PUBLIC schools.
Education has, in recent years, become a wonderful scapegoat for politicians in need of an issue to flog. Can’t cure unemployment? Can’t balance the budget? Screwing the poor left and right? Don’t worry, folks, because I will FIX THE EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM!
…even if it weren’t broke to begin with.
A quote from above:
Ah. Nice to know we can boil a complicated problem down into a couple of simple sentences. Oh, wait, no we can’t.
This would seem to indicate that public education does not work. Anywhere. At all. Pardon me if I disagree. There are thousands of public schools that are doing just fine, thank you… but they would still suffer if voucher systems were put into play on any kind of widespread level.
This would also seem to indicate that if a school district is having trouble educating its students, that the obvious answer is to cripple it further, rather than investigating the reasons and, like, actually doing something about them. Pardon me if I disagree.
I’m not so worried about the inner city schools as I am the rural school districts. Quite often, these districts suffer because they’re way the hell and gone out in the middle of nowhere, and the best teachers may not want to LIVE way the hell and gone out in the middle of nowhere… hence, we either pay big bonus bucks, to lure them out there… or we do with substandard education. Hell, this is a SIMPLE problem! This problem CAN BE FIXED SIMPLY BY THROWING MONEY AT IT!
…but instead, we will issue vouchers, and cripple this distant, rural school. Perhaps other schools will open to compete with it, thus distributing the funding over several schools, none of which is as well funded as the original…
…or perhaps NO schools will open, leaving the local folks with the exact same problem they had before.
This is a solution? And this is just ONE of the issues lurking in wait in the Great Voucher Debate.
Poor school districts are another fun topic. These districts can’t afford the best teachers, much less buildings, equipment, books, and so on. Once again, this problem could be solved by throwing money at it… and this is exactly what DID happen, via the “Robin Hood Law,” which lifted extra budget money from the state ed budget and allocated it to poorer districts.
Admittedly, the higher income folks and hardcore conservatives did NOT like this idea, which smacked of socialism, and argued, “Why should MY tax dollars be taken out of MY district, to pay for educating the little (insert plural racial epithet of choice here) in some POOR district?”
…and lo and behold, we began hearing about the voucher system. A system which, in every field test so far, has yet to work for educators and their students… although the politicians seem to have made plenty hay out of it.
If some part of the system, in some given location, is broken, fine. Fix it. But crippling the entire system and handing it over to private hands, while regulating those private hands LESS than we did the public ones?
You know, the S&L crisis taught us an important lesson about deregulation. Why are we so damn anxious to do the same thing all over again… with the education of our children?