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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: donjuan_demarco who wrote (47009)	10/16/2000 4:53:32 PM
From: Art Bechhoefer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769667

I don't know what the latest figures are, but I doubt if the funding, no matter what it is, is anywhere near sufficient. But I was referring to the history of underfunding in District of Columbia schools, and I don't think there is any argument about how bad off the public schools were for decades, if not generations. This is not to say that the DC schools were worse than those of hundreds of other districts throughout the country, and it is very possible that, particularly in states like Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Texas, and even California, the present state of public education in low income districts is appalling. If you doubled the money available in low income districts, you'd still be merely scratching the surface. You'd have to deal not only with higher standards and salaries for teachers but with student deficiencies in health, learning ability, and family structure before you'd accomplish anything measureable. And regardless of the effort, you wouldn't see success for at least 10 to 15 years of concentrated effort. My daughter teaches high school Spanish to students in a poor, rural California community. Many of the students come from families of migrants and farm workers. Many of the students show learning impairments connected with drinking water that has been contaminated by the intensive irrigation in the area farms. Try to fix that in a hurry? You gotta be kidding. These kinds of problems aren't even addressed by the Bush plan, and certainly are not solved by the mere issue of vouchers. That's the problem with the Republican initiatives. They're all made out to look like these problems can be solved easily, if we'll just think differently from before. Pure malarky, but maybe a lot of voters will be taken in.