Education

In yesterday's post about speculation, I included some comments on the educational system. Today I would like to address the system itself. I'm speculating, of course.



First off, I want to talk about school vouchers. Some states have a school voucher program. One of the provisions of the "No Child Left Behind" Act (also known as the "No Teacher Left Standing" Act) is to make school vouchers available to parents with children in under-performing schools (another is to allow that student to simply transfer to another school in the same district that has higher scores). I have two problems with school vouchers:

1) If we make school vouchers available when a school is under performing, where does the money for private school come from (or, for that matter, if we transfer a student from one school to another school, where does the school the student is transferred to get its funding for this new student)? Presumably from the underachieving school. Now, if the underachieving school loses money every time one of its students jumps ship in the attempt to get a better education, granted that is a pretty strong motivator to get the school up to speed, but, let's face it, budget was probably a factor in the school's original problems anyway. If you stop and think about it, the school building still has to be heated in the winter (if anything, losing students will increase the heating bill), the teacher's still have to get paid (how many students have to leave before we can fire a teacher? realistically, about 125 to 180 in a given grade), the principal, the secretary, and the custodian all still have to get paid. So where do we cut corners? It's not like they can sell the unused desk and recover the money from their budget that they lost when the student transferred. On the other hand, we can't very well increase the school's budget every time it fails to meet a benchmark--some of our schools would deliberately fail just to get more money.

2) The courts have ruled that school vouchers cannot be used at schools sponsored by religious organizations (This is cited as separation of church and state, in that tax dollars would be going to a religious institution. Personally, I think that the ruling is itself a violation of church and state in that the state is now discriminating against schools based on religious affiliation, but that's a subject for another time). Let's face it, the vast majority of private schools in this country are religious in nature. I could be mistaken, but I think the Roman Catholic church operates most of the private schools, but other churches, as well as temples, and mosques operate private schools as well. If we eliminate most private schools from the list of ones where vouchers can be used, we have severely limited what schools these parents can take their kids to. Are they really going to get a better education there? In most cases, yes, because the private school wouldn't have survived without vouchers if it didn't do its job well, but what happens if the private school suddenly becomes flooded with students from public schools? How long will it take before somebody figures out that if he throws together a building and hires a few teachers, that he can make a lot of money providing sub-standard education to kids just because the local public school stinks?



So what's wrong with public schools? I think that we have too many students in a class. Of course, to reduce class size would entail hiring more teachers, and, in some cases (most cases?), would require adding classrooms. Both of these cost money. This means more tax dollars. We, in general, fight increases in taxes, not just because it's more money out of my pocket, but also because we frequently see tax dollars get spent wastefully. Could we eliminate waste and hire more teachers? That's an idea, but we're going to have to ping on our elected representatives pretty hard to make that happen.

Also, I think that our schools are poorly designed. Let's face it, most public schools are just plain ugly. What does your child think when you send him off to an ugly, inefficient building to learn? Doesn't that send the message that learning isn't important? (so does paying a professional athlete {and possible steroid user} millions of dollars a year, while paying a teacher starvation wages.) We have a lot of old school buildings in this country. They aren't insulated well, and they don't have efficient heating/air conditioning. The buildings themselves are expensive to maintain, but as long as they stand and can be heated, they aren't likely to be replaced, or even re-insulated.

Another problem that we have is textbooks. Many schools are still using old textbooks, because the money's not in the budget to buy up-to-date textbooks. Even then, textbooks are often written by professional writers, rather than by scientists, historians, mathematicians, biologists, or other professionals. Granted, a writer may be better at getting ideas across, but there are a lot of content issues with textbooks because they aren't compiled by people that actually work with the material that should be in the book. What good is it to get the idea across if the idea is just plain wrong?



Mostly, it comes down to money. How much are we, as a society, willing to spend on the education of our children? We should be willing to prioritize. Which is more important to us: Watching an exciting sporting event, or our child's future? Having a federally funded government project in our home state, or having a child that knows the names and capitals of every state? Maybe what we really need to consider is that what nursing home we wind up in may very well depend on how much money our kids are earning, which in turn depends on how good their jobs are, which, in turn, depends on how good their education was...