Quote:
Originally Posted by Atticus Grinch
No shit. But what I'm saying is that schools are a reflection of the community they serve. They do not and cannot save that community from itself, no matter how much we would like to think the American Dream can be kick-started by one Jaime Escalante character per school.
I'm saying, we all have choices and what we have chosen is this: that the quality of an American education varies widely based on the resources and capacity of one's parents. We cry about this, but we do nothing to change it. People like Penske blame the school administrators and the unions for wanting the system to be this way. That is bullshit. The American people want the system to be this way, because (1) it's what they voted for one way or another; (2) the people who have excess capacity in their daily struggle to survive for their kid's education manage to have enough we-clawed-our-way-out stories to provide false anecdotal hope that people in horrifying situations can succeed if they make the right sacrifices and (3) all the people who vote have kids in good-enough schools.
BTW, before you hop on any bandwagon with Penske, we should be clear on something -- does P think we should have a system of public schools, and if so, should that system have the same, more or fewer resources than the system we have? Because I suspect the answer he'll give is the same Republican bullshit we've always gotten -- "all the inputs are bad EXCEPT money, which looks fine from here" -- and crying about inner city teens is just his way of railing against the system because he knows it's a cheap way to buy credibility on the topic.
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I have run a school, in the black, with a $4MM budget and 250 kids, 20% of whom had parents earning less than $30K/year; and another 20% of whom had parents earning between $30K-60K/year, i.e. large financial aid budget; and no endowment.
I have seen the budgets for similarly sized Seattle public schools, and there is a lot of flab, mostly in the wages category. Administrative excess and waste. and Unions. That said, I would be in favour of significantly higher taxes to fund schools if there were appropriate budget controls and performance metrics put into place.
