Home > Thinking Right > Archives > 2006 > July > 13
Thursday, July 13, 2006
Money’s not the answer
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Today may prove significant in the national school reform movement. A group of parents in Newark, N.J., is filing a class action lawsuit asking that 60,000 childen locked in failing schools be permitted to leave, taking a pro rata share of the public money spent on them. With that money, parents would be free to buy the education services their children need in other public or private schools.
Similar suits have been filed around the country, including here in Georgia, but with a different appeal. They’re filed not primarily on behalf of parents, but at the behest of administrators seeking more money. More money. Always more, excuses and money.
In Newark, as related by Clint Bolick, president of the Phoenix-based Alliance for School Choice, spending amounts to $16,351 per student and teachers are paid an average of $76,213. And yet half the students lack basic math and language arts proficiency. Courts have gotten involved and have increased spending but without the results that parents want.
Wednesday’s Thinking Right blog started out discussing the futility of raising the minimum wage, since the real minimum wage is zero. It turned, however, to this important subject, as framed by Southern Democrat: OK, so mandated increases are not the best solution. “This issue, however, seems to be a flashpoint for a conflict between the two keystones of the American democratic experiment: opportunity for all (without a landed gentry or aristocracy) and a market economy.” The market economy values skills. “How do we continue to let the market work while providing for more opportunity for those without access and/or parents supporting them?”
There is an answer. It’s contained in the New Jersey suit — though, honestly, I’m not any more desirous of conservative judicial activism than I am of liberal judicial activism. The legislature should do what the suit asks: Give parents a portion of the money set aside to educate their children to be spent as parents choose to purchse the education services their children need. It’s a three-step process: Give parents information about school performance. Give them a stipend or tax credit based on the child’s needs. And, finally, encourage the free market to create new schools to serve like-needs children. Support public schools, but create a new model — one not built for an agrarian economy with stable, supportive two-parent families.
You can’t dump society’s problems at the schoolhouse door, blending classes that include the gifted, slow-learners, the daddy-deprived, discipline problems, the disabled, and those who barely speak English, while expecting success. It’s unrealistic. Give parents choice and the grants to make choice real.
(Today’s topic — education — is in tribute to Jeff, an active, intelligent and well-informed contributor during Thinking Right’s first month. Jeff, a math teacher, takes his idealism into the public school classroom in a rural Southwest Georgia county where lots of children struggle with poverty — and his subject, as did I. This is his first day on the job. Win ‘em over, Jeff. And rejoin us when you can. We’ll keep a post open for you.)
.JPG)
-1.JPG)
Services »
