Carla, posting a comment at Crooked Timber, outlines a four-step solution to fixing public schools. The emphasis added is mine.
One of the things I find most distressing about this whole conversation is that it elides the problems facing public schools and the people who attend and teach at them. A country—or locality—that does not maintain a strong commitment to a high-quality, free public education is willing to write off some of its citizens. We are failing in that, in many places, for many reasons. But the solution is not to further fragment the funding and further reduce the commitment. And I also believe that (a) teachers should be highly qualified and well-compensated (right now, the best way for a good teacher to make more money is to become an administrator, not stay a teacher), (b) teachers should have more say in teaching, © school should not have a three-month break in the summer, and (d) there should be some basic national standards (reading level; mathematical competency; historical knowledge, for example) that all students should learn. There’s plenty of room for local/state variation after that. Once we have achieved that, once we have built and put in place the mechanisms for maintaining a public education system throughout the country, then we can talk about vouchers and “school choice.”
I have trying to figure out why the Westminster deal got me so riled up. I believe there are two very real threats to our future: accelerating income disparity, and the collapse of the public education system.
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