Here is a question for parents everywhere: Suppose a genie popped out of a lamp and offered to make your world colorblind and perfectly racially integrated on one condition ”” that you relinquish all control over where your children go to school. Would you take that offer?
Having followed school desegregation efforts for nearly two decades as an education reporter, I can vouch that the overwhelming majority of parents would tell that genie to buzz off. Most want their children in the best schools possible, to gain an edge that will help them get into a good college and land a good job. As a result, our ideal of public schools as “the great equalizer” is constantly undermined by parents who will do whatever it takes to ensure that their own children’s education will be superior.
In my experience, many outstanding non-public schools, throughout the USA, as well as many of the UK’s and European nation’s government schools, include students from every imaginable ethnic background. “Integration” is no obstacle to educational excellence in the public sector; the problems are families whose lack of vision sabotages their children’s futures, outmoded curricula, teachers who are required to be trained in classroom teaching technique yet not required to know much about the subjects they are teaching, and school administrators who imagine themselves high priests above reproach from the public who must pay their salaries.
“…no obstacle to educational excellence in the public sector.”
Not so, Hank, and those parents know it. Maybe what you say is the way it SHOULD be, but it isn’t. Idiot ideological teachers, decaying buildings, peers who care less for education, all these things harm gov’t schools.
When what you say comes true, those parents will send their kids to “integrated” schools; until then they will continue voting with thir feet. Caring for your kids isn’t unGodly.
In faith, Dave
Viva Texas
Re: “our ideal of public schools as ‘the great equalizer’.. vs.. parent’s desire for superior education for their kids”
Who is this “our” of whom he speaks?
Maybe I’m a neanderthal, but I always thought the ideal of schools was education — not equalization. Maybe that explains why we homeschool our children — my wife and I have no desire for our children to receive an “equally mediocre” education as the children of parents who don’t care what kind of education their kids recieve.
Race is not a factor.
When our daughter was in Kindergarten (all those years ago) she had friends in school and could visit them after school. When she went into first grade, the new principal made each class was as even as possible in every demographic category: race, sex, home owner, home renter, apartment renter, mom & dad married, mom & step dad, dad & step mom, mom alone, dad alone, in after school day care or not. The result of all this “equalizing” was that our daughter was the only one in her class that did not go to day care after school. The school had gotten so bad that the president of the PTA during our daughter’s K year had taken her kids to private school the very next year. We solved the problem a different way – we moved to a suburb with much better schools.
As for public school being the “great equalizer” – what a load of cr@p! Public schools were always locally controlled and the best was done with the resources available. Public education began to decline when people started seeing education’s goal as equalization, not education (both academic and socially).
YBIC,
Phil Snyder
[i] “When asked whether they would be willing to have their own kids in classrooms alongside children from lower-income backgrounds, their liberal ideals went out the window.” [/i]
(Since I have [i] almost [/i] no liberal ideals, this would not be a problem).
The author raises some good points in the article.
Children learn as much, or more, from their fellow students as from their teachers. We are unwilling to expose our daughters & sons, especially in the younger grades, to children from environments plagued by drug use, alcoholism, foul language, crime, illegitimacy, and divorce, and from homes where nobody reads but the television is spewing crap 18 hours a day.
Dysfunctional families are not confined to any one race or economic stratum. But for our children, we make the best decision we can, even if our prejudices & superficial judgments come into play, and knowing that we don’t have perfect knowledge or full control.
And for this, we don’t need to apologize to professional scolds.
Well said Wilfred.
The article is actually pretty good (I apologize for making my earlier comment before reading the whole thing), but the author who agrees that race is not a particular issue, bases his question as one of “class” (ie, poverty) instead.
But then Wilfred goes and hits the nail on the head: “We are unwilling to expose our daughters & sons, especially in the younger grades, to children from environments plagued by drug use, alcoholism, foul language, crime, illegitimacy, and divorce, and from homes where nobody reads but the television is spewing crap 18 hours a day. ”
These things are not unique to any particular “class”, but if they are concentrated among the lower classes (the poor), it begs the question — which came first? Poverty and low class status? Or immoral and ignorant behaviour?
Marty, You’ve hit on something. Probably the two, poverty and immoral behavior, feed on each other. I read some years back an article which proposed the Church and Godly behavior are the best remedies for poverty… and now I see why that might be true. What a difference if the immoral behaviors of poor areas could be changed into moral Godly behavior!!!
In faith, Dave
Viva Texas
“Our ideal of public schools as ‘the great equalizer’ is constantly undermined by parents who will do whatever it takes to ensure that their own children’s education will be superior”
The education establishment’s long war against content and meritocracy badly undermined public schools’ role as a force for equality of opportunity. So did teacher unions’ devotion to treating incompetent or marginally competent teachers much the same as outstanding teachers (think seniority and opposition to merit pay).
The education establishment’s long war against content and meritocracy badly undermined public schools’ role as a force for equality of opportunity. So did teacher unions’ devotion to treating incompetent or marginally competent teachers much the same as outstanding teachers (think seniority and opposition to merit pay).
I think Irenaeus is right. I think public education is also hurt by taxpayers who don’t value the education of the community’s children as much as they value their own wants. When the first high school was built in my hometown, circa 1907, it was a source of community pride and care was taken to make it the best facility it could be. Now we have cookie-cutter schools done on the cheap – a sign of the change in the community and its values.
Any parents who aren’t trying to obtain the best possible education for their children are unfit to have children. Social engineering be da**ed.
Having made that choice for my children I take issue with the sentiment that we “chose” segregation. We did not choose segregation, we chose education.
My wife is a public school teacher in a generally affluent district. The burdens that she has put on her by the state, the district and the parents are incredible. Private schools don’t have to put up with most of this, if parents become uncooperative they can be politely directed to another private school more to their liking or to the public system.
Having seen public schools from the inside we do not regret sending our children to Catholic schools and if we had the opportunity (grandchildren?) would do so again.
Just to say, a number of parents where I live do indeed choose segregation, sending their children to one of two private Christian academies where the education is, definitely, inferior to that of the public schools. These schools date to the period of school desegregation and they are still rooted in that.
My wife is an elementary school teacher at an “Exemplary” elementary school in our surburan school district. Tthe districts new push is for teachers to teach to the classroom at differnt speeds for the different abilities in the classroom. I can only conclude that this is blowback from parents irritated by the fact that they no longer ability group/track the kids. Realistically a teacher either has to teach to the middle of the pack – thereby boring the high achievers and leaving behind the slow learners or go at the speed of the slowest (ie the convoy system). In fact they are also now putting kids with severe disabilities into the regular classroom – and in some instances the taxpayer is footing the bill for teachers aides on a one to one basis. This is madness – I have concluded that public education is doomed until the cititzens retake control from the education bureacrats and left wing teachers lobby.
Yikes chip, but it certainly rings a bell for us.
My daughter attended a public school for 1st grade, and it started low and remained low all year. The day I went in to ask if she could skip a grade was the same day they recommended she be tested for ADD! As if!
And now my 5 year old son is due to enter kindergarten. Now what parent in his right mind would put a little boy who already reads at a 2nd grade level into a public school kindergarten class???
Sorry Junior — you’re going to stay home — and stay ahead.
The opening scenario in this article, while being a good attention grabber, sets up a false dichotomy. This supposed Genie offers complete racial intergration and colorblind world at the cost of no choice in school education. Racial integration is good (I mean look no further than Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well), but to ask people to give up any form of choice for racial intergration with no guarantee of educational quality is faulty from the beginning. Tying people to a school that may be integrated but terrible isn’t really my idea of a bargain. I think if the scenario was reframed into a genie offering a high quality and integrated school, I would imagine the outcome would be somewhat different.
My eldest daughter goes to a Catholic high school. Since the school is supported by stewardship (everybody is supposed to tithe), she attends with low income children whose parents did not graduate high school, (probably) illegal hispanic immigrants, vietnamese immigrants (who are poorer than the hispanic immigrants) as well as the children of catholic doctors and lawyers. There are also a smattering of African American transplants from Katrina.
What we share is a desire for godly children, and a respect for education.
My kid is a junior and is in AP Physics, AP Calculus, Honors English, Computer Programming, World History and Church History. (She takes Spanish during the summers at the local university). The smartest kid in the school’s parents don’t speak English (yet).
There is a private, hot shot college prep school in town, where my kid could go mingle with her “class”. However I am satisfied with the academic preparation that my daughter is receiving, and I believe the moral preparation that she is receiving is superior than that offered by the local prep school.
Racial and economic integration can work (btw I’m from Sri Lanka and my kids are from El Salvador and Guatemala). However the key ingredient is the church.
Poverty is far more devastating in secular homes, than it is in homes of faith.
Shari
My two elder kids went to an exemplary public elementary school; I don’t think any private school could have done better by them. Then came middle school (for the eldest, at least; the next starts there on Monday). OK– yes, the teachers are generally very good, but every sixth grader in the neighborhood was physically attacked in the first week of school. All of these schools are racially very mixed, btw. We had to be very persistent in getting our eldest into the closest high school instead of one which by all accounts has a lot of discipline problems.
I have friends up in Massachussetts who have been exposed to the whole “my life is failure if my child doesn’t go to Harvard” private school hysteria, and I wouldn’t want to go anywhere near that (if only because I don’t think that much of Harvard). But (here comes an Anglican thought) there’s a middle ground between that and sacrificing my kids on the altar of social engineering. If I can’t put every child into a situation where they have a reasonable chance of a reasonable education, I really have to try to put my child into such a situation. If there are a lot of people who don’t care or are antithetical to it, I don’t see that I have any obligation to subject my kids– or anyone’s kids– to their malign influences, for whatever reason.