School choice?

To borrow a quote from the previous post:

 

A KPBS news article describes the situation perfectly:Teachers in San Diego schools have been through years of seeing pink slips issued and then rescinded, so many expect the same to happen this year. But Lorena Gonzalez, secretary and CEO of the San Diego and Imperial Counties Labor Council, said Thursday that sitting back and waiting for the district’s more than $120 million deficit to work itself out won’t work this time.

“You see what’s happening up and down our state with the number of school districts that are facing the same kind of economic crisis we’re seeing here,” she said. “Things are different.”

 


Things ARE different. We’ve hit a number of economic walls. Without changes in how we fund and manage our educational establishments, the already gaping chasm between our have and have-not districts will grow into an abyss.Dublin Edinburgh and sausage I hope 285

Thems as has gits. It’s always been that way. But as the world becomes more technologically advanced, the opportunity cost of not-having grows greater. Our poorest districts need longer hours and longer school years. As our municipalities retreat financially, who will provide these hours?

More and more, I favor the School Choice Movement. To quote from  a 1/26/2012 article by Michael Wille at http://illinoispolicy.org/blog/blog.asp?ArticleSource=4642:

About ten cents of every dollar allocated to school districts in this country comes from the Department of Education. States and local communities are the sources for the overwhelming amount of public dollars dedicated to the education system. Parents, teachers and local school boards best understand the needs of their students and institutions of learning. The strings attached to federal dollars often burden local community leaders with compliance costs. The teachers are constrained by these regulations, and students suffer as a result. Tying public dollars to families and allowing the money to follow the child will produce a better system for all.

Various government agencies have aggressively attacked the disparity in results between districts in different zip codes and we have received remarkably little return for our tax-dollar investments. It’s time to let parents vote with their feet. It’s time to let teachers teach their students what those students don’t know, and not what some pie-in-the-sky curriculum written by someone who has never taught a single hour in a classroom.