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To the dismay of many supporters, the Clintons will send 12-year-old Chelsea to a private school after the family moves to Washington -- unlike the Carters, who sent Amy to a public school.
It is hypocritical, since candidate Clinton was a vocal supporter of public schools. But parents should raise their children as best they can, not use their offspring as political statements. Score one for family values.
Further, Clinton might have been trying to save tax money. If Chelsea goes to a public school, she will be accompanied by the Secret Service. There's one school whose students won't tote pistols to class or sell crack on the playground. It would become safe and clean, and with the publicity, Chelsea and her classmates would see excellent teachers.
Good for that school. But parents whose children are stuck in other D.C. schools would then sue because they are being denied equal access to good public education. The litigation would cost plenty of tax money, and if they won, taxes would rise to make all schools as good as Chelsea's.
Perhaps taxes need not rise. The relationship between money and educational quality is about as solid as the relationship between lunar phases and the Dow-Jones average.
According to the New York Times, the District of
Columbia school system is notoriously
underfinanced.
Really? In 1989, the District spent $5,827 per student -- good for sixth place if it were a state. If D.C. schools suffer serious poverty, then so do Colorado's (17th, $4,633), Arkansas's (50th, $2,698) and those of 43 other states. Among them is South Dakota (44th, $3,329), a recent leader in standardized-testing scores -- the District, spending almost twice as much, ranked near the bottom.
Those are numbers -- spending vs. results -- which
Jonathan Kozol steadfastly refuses to address in Savage
Inequalities,
a book sent by a kind reader.
Kozol can bring tears as he describes the difference between the sordid urban schools of Camden, N.J., ($4,000) and the wonderland five minutes away in suburban Cherry Hill ($6,000). The children of Camden didn't do anything to deserve falling plaster and a severe textbook shortage.
Kozol also points to a hypocrisy which affects far more people than the Clintons' decision about Chelsea's school. Prosperous suburbanites will say that more money won't improve schools in general, but they're also willing to spend ample money on the schools their own children go to. If money doesn't matter that much, he asks, why do they insist on spending it on their own children?
Thanks to Kozol and many others, we have ample documentation on poor schools that don't work. And the District of Columbia (advocates of more federal involvement in education should note that the federal government is responsible for its public schools) is an example of a relatively prosperous school system that doesn't work.
But certainly there are good schools which don't spend much money -- South Dakota is evidence of that.
Why hasn't anybody studied such schools, to learn what they do so that we might apply those lessons elsewhere? Alas, funding for such studies comes from the U.S. Department of Education, a subsidiary of the National Educational Association, which doesn't want us to think about anything except sending more money to NEA members.
If Clinton could get and publish an honest report on
Cheap Schools That Work Well and What We Could Learn
from Them,
he'd do more to improve public education
than if he and Hillary adopted a dozen children and sent
them to public schools.
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