Klien is running with your budget philosophy, John. Of course, the oppo here is just as far off base with the attitude of "blame the parents."
More Money for Schools Won’t Buy Good Results
ALICIA COLON acolon@nysun.com
Schools Chancellor Joel Klein has delivered an ultimatum to state lawmakers: Give the city schools billions of dollars in additional aid or he’ll take them to court. Hmmm.
Billions of dollars more will bring the total budget to $14.2 billion.That’s roughly enough to send every public school student to private school, and Johnny still can’t read.
New York City has one of the largest budgets and yet its schools still perform below average. You’d think by now someone would consider the fact that throwing good money after bad is not the answer.
Howard Hurwitz was an educator for more than 40 years. He was a principal for 11 years and earned his doctorate degree at Columbia University with a thesis on Theodore Roosevelt, and is the author of 12 books.
He insists throwing money at the schools is not the answer when the home environment of many of the students overshadows what they can learn in the school. The high rate of Hispanic and black students makes it an especially difficult task, he says, but the students are educable.
Through the past decades the system has also suffered from the decline of good teachers. For many years, Mr. Hurwitz said, teachers had to pass stiff exams before they could be certified. That’s no longer the case. “The unions are directly responsible for keeping incompetent teachers within the school system,” he said.
Professor Joan Callahan was a special-education teacher for 10 years, spent 15 as an education evaluator, and just retired after teaching special education at St. John’s University.
She had plenty to say: “First of all, if you took every cent in this country and poured it into the schools it wouldn’t make a sou’s worth of difference, unless the home lives and parents begin to pour everything they’ve got into preparing their children for school, and cooperating in the education of their children. After all, the easiest thing for any teacher to do is teach. It is what they have trained for, and what they have chosen to do with their lives.
“Unfortunately, teaching has become incidental to civilizing and mothering many of these children, feeding them, consoling them, acting as counselors, trying to extract homework, trip money, permission slips, because the parents are not doing their job.
“Send a child to school properly nourished, prepared with materials, dressed appropriately, with respect for education, the teacher, other authority figures, and the teachers will do their job to the best of their ability. And the child will learn to the best of their ability.
“Unfortunately, too many children and, sadly, minority children are coping with home lives that a saint would have trouble handling. Drugs, divorce, abuse, promiscuity, selfish parents and the corrosive influence of the ‘entertainment’ industry make life a living hell for these poor kids.
Ms. Callahan continued: “Why the heck should they give a hoot that ‘a says ah’ [figurative for learning to read!]? But sadly, the politicians won’t touch this with the proverbial 10-foot pole. Fix the homes and the schools, for the most part, will fix themselves.”
When asked for her opinion about social promotion, she suggested, “Why isn’t anyone recommending the old system of 1A, 1B, 2A, 2B, etc., so a child is only held over for six months instead of a full year? Often that’s enough to allow the child to mature or catch up.”
It’s so much easier to ask for more money than to criticize minority parents.
In 1997, a Texas Law School professor named Lino Graglia started a huge controversy on campus when he dared to suggest that the main reason minority students didn’t do as well as white students in school was not racism, but that in his view too many black and Hispanic families put a low priority on education. Naturally he was vilified as a racist.
Why do Asian students do so well? It’s not race. It’s not genetics. It’s priority. Any student will excel regardless of ethnicity if his or her parents realize the importance of education in their child’s future.
Condoleezza Rice is not who she is because of a twist of fate. Her parents placed a high priority on education and did all they could to furnish her with the opportunity to excel.
The afternoon of her testimony before the 9/11 panel, I sat on a bus in front of two young black girls whom I overheard snidely call Ms. Rice an “Oreo.”
Then one girl’s cell phone rang and she proceeded to loudly curse out her boyfriend using the “n” word and gross profanity. Her language and Ebonics speech were worlds apart from that of the most important woman in America today, yet they belong to the same race.
I used to write résumés as a sideline and I once visited the home of a Sri Lankan woman to collect details for her curricula vitae. It was a hot summer day, but her two children were in the dining room poring over math books. Is there any doubt her children will do well in school?
Chancellor, our schools don’t need more money as much as parents need a new attitude. |
