Destroying Public Education. David Salisbury pretends to see desegregation advanced by promoting private schools, but what he is really promoting is segregation by income more than by race - altho there's plenty of segregation by race in private schools too.
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When the U.S. Supreme Court said "in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal", it was talking about the political realities of a segregation-minded board of education. There's a difference between "inherently" and "necessarily" unequal. There is absolutely no reason why a preponderantly black school cannot be every bit as good as a preponderantly white school. That does not, however, guarantee equality of outcomes.
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The British newsmagazine The Economist some years ago did a report on a huge, court-mandated (and thus unconstitutional) spending program for the public schools of Kansas City, Missouri. Something like $2 billion was lavished on public schools in all neighborhoods, but test scores for blacks did not shoot up. Equality of opportunity does not mean equality of outcomes.
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Salisbury says, "Black and Hispanic students in urban centers suffer disproportionately from failing public school systems. Today, 45 percent of black and 47 percent of Hispanic students drop out of public high schools (vs. 24 percent of whites)."
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Think about that. If people don't attend schools but drop out, how can we blame their educational deficiencies on the schools? If they stayed in school and paid attention, wouldn't they be better educated? But the people who drop out in many cases have contempt for education, never paid attention, and at least pretend to hold smart people in contempt as out-of-it, uncool losers. The culture of poverty is a culture of stupidity, where stupidity is actually valued more highly than intelligence, and rejection of education is a perverted mark of manhood. It doesn't matter if you have the best schools in the world if kids refuse to attend, does it?
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Salisbury then reveals his true agenda: "If we are to ever see [a split infinitive! my goodness!] the day when children of all races have access to good schools, we need policies that let inner-city parents escape racially segregated and inferior public schools." Ah. He's out to destroy the public schools and shift public moneys to private schools, which benefit primarily the rich. Once again, the rich are caught with their hands in your pocket.
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"Vouchers" for the poor will never pay the full cost of attending a good private school, because such schools are very expensive, and we aren't going to pay premium prices so a few kids can attend private schools. If we were to adopt vouchers at full value of private education for ALL kids, our educational costs would skyrocket, and we all know that as a practical matter, overburdened poor and middle-class taxpayers just won't put up with that. So vouchers will always cover only part of the cost of private education for some kids, not all. Poor and many middle-class parents, especially those in the lower middle class or who have more than one school-age child, will not be able to afford the remainder of the bill, so will have to send their children to public schools, vouchers or no vouchers. But the public schools that the less prosperous will need to attend will have far less money to work with, because the rich will have stolen moneys from the public schools to send their own children to private school.
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You see, the rich don't want to pay for anybody's education but their own. Never mind that I, a single gay man who has no children, and scores of millions of other childless people pay taxes for public education without complaint because we understand that raising kids to be civilized is a necessary function of any civilization, the alternative being that each generation become a fresh barbarian invasion.
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The rich are going to send their kids to private schools whether they get vouchers or not. But if they have access to vouchers, do you think they will say, "Oh, no thanks. I don't need that. I can afford to pay for my own kids' education"? Of course not. They will take the money and run from social democracy, to enroll their kids in schools where they don't have to associate with 'the common people'.
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Plainly the rich intend to take money out of the public schools deliberately to make them even worse, as will help them rationalize their refusal to participate in social democracy by sending their children to the same schools as the rest of us.
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We are, in short, being asked to subsidize class stratification, that is, income segregation. The poor, we are really being told, should pay for the education of the rich, but the rich are not to be required to pay for the education of the poor. That would be very socially destructive policy that voters must reject. The utterly selfish, rich slime who propose such theft from the poor should be denounced as the enemies of democratic society they are.
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I would rather burn to the ground every last private school in the United States than see the rich become an aristocracy apart from the rest of us whose elite education is paid for by dollars stolen from the poor. (Responsive to "Brown at 50: Still Separate", New York Post, May 17, 2004)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:08 PM