In order to do what you are talking about America would have to go back to a time where there most mothers stayed home with their children. The feminist "revolution" and its attendant idea that children benefitted from mothers working and children being in daycare is difficult to reverse. You would have to raise the minimum wage so that one person in a household working could support a family. You would have to somehow reverse the inflow of immigrants, because if you talk to most teachers (my mother was an elementary school teacher) it became much more difficult to teach when children started coming to class speaking different languages. I believe this trend started in the 1970's. In my mother's classroom children from Vietnam, Laos, Mexico, and several other nations made it much harder to utilize the teaching day efficiently. While I wish that America was still like that, I don't think it's going to happen. All of these social engineering kind of things take vast amounts of tax dollars.
I think voucher programs weaken public schools enormously. If the goal is for minority children to finish school and attend college, we could also accomplish that by actually funding fairly inner city schools, sending them the best, not the worst, teachers, and involving parents in their children's education all the way up. There are programs in poor communities that do this, and they work. Inner city schools also have become de facto segregated again. I think we have to stop isolating all the poor people in one place, because their children don't see positive role models, and almost all their schools are bad. Strangely, affluent white people often send their children to public schools even if they can afford private school, because public schools are good in their communities.
The fact is that we have to deal with the situation as it is. Feeding children and establishing universal preschools and fully funding Head Start and involving even poor parents in their children's education do not enslave people to handouts and poverty. |
