The idea that vouchers will improve education by allowing kids to migrate to better schools is, I think, fundamentally flawed. First, it focuses on the school as the source of the problem, which I think is a mistake. Schools reflect the communities which surround them. Schools in upper middle class communities have a broader, deeper funding base, educated, concerned parents, and numerous other advantages. Certainly if you put one kid from a ghetto school into this environment, that kid will benefit immensely. But if you put a hundred ghetto kids in that school, I'm not sure they'd benefit at all. The only result would be a lot of middle-class parents moving their kids to private schools, taking the advantage with them. The same problem prevails everywhere up the chain. Everybody wants to go to the good schools, but if the good schools let everyone in they won't be the good schools any more.
There is no simple solution to the school problem, which is why it makes very bad campaign material. Campaign managers and speechwriters like issues that can be dealt with in a few sentences. Any "solution" to the education problem that is quick, snappy, and rolls off the tongue like honey is not going to be very useful in practice.
I really think the root of the problem is in the community and the home, not in the school. My son's teacher is a youngish American, from Seattle, very energetic, with a thousand newfangled techniques, many of which are the same sort of thing that has failed miserably in American schools. Here, they work brilliantly. They work because there are 15 kids in a class tops, 200 in the whole school, everybody knows each other, and most misbehaviour is as likely to be reprimanded by other students as by faculty. A lot of the kids are Taiwanese, Korean, and Japanese, and they are a terrific influence.
Americans are about 15% of the student body, and account for virtually 100% of the discipline problems. I talk to parents from all over the world about kids and school almost daily, and in some detail. Oddly, I have never met a non-American parent who has heard of ADD, though every American knows all about it. It seems a purely American disorder.
The point, before I wander off, is that the methods and manners and budgets of schools may have less impact on the quality of education than the nature of the communities around the school. |
