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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (11209)	10/27/1998 1:55:00 PM
From: Charles Hughes	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 67261

>>> chaz, when did you go to schools in Ca? Did you happen to go to Palo Alto public schools or another district that is well known for excellent schools or is it just the average public school experience you are commenting on? <<< School in the 50's and sixties, in California and Oregon. Menlo Park, Half Moon Bay, Santa Monica, San Francisco. Portland. Brentwood. Clackamas. Quite a mixture. Still going of course. I take 9 hours right now, in San Francisco, at night. A variety of schools. I went to one public high school in Oregon that had a science curriculum financed by Reynolds Metals and Tektronics and Intel, which was a common arrangement in those days. A couple of upper middle class neighborhoods and a couple of rural poor neighborhoods. Menlo Park when it was the main bedroom community for Stanford, so that was an exception as well. (BTW, that movie 'The Slums of Beverley Hills' is one I really can relate to. It has a connection to this topic which you will realize if you see it. Imagine me in that car. :-) The schools with the Merit scholars were in Oregon, both public schools, albeit better ones. One of them was in quite a rural area. In those days there was no problem in getting any good student into the area's best school, they could always transfer. The classes were uniformly 20-30 students then, as I recall it. Honors students had smaller classes than that in general. Kids went to school one more hour a day than now, which I think is the most important difference. Unless you count the corporal punishment :-) Berkeley was absolutely free until the late sixties, when Reagan instituted the first admission fees. I understand that the current reduction in class size for the lower grades is being accomplished by increasing class sizes for older students, to a degree. If your child is 6 or 7 they should be OK, but the older students are going to have it worse off. I don't have any kids in school now, so naturally I would like the taxes I pay to fund public schools, where the money can do the most good. The more kids go to private school, the worse the public schools will be. OTOH, if I had kids in school now, I would send them to private school. But I wouldn't whine about vouchers, which is just taking money from poor kids, done by people who can afford otherwise and who should know better. On Palo Alto - I just had some good friends move there so they can put the kids in public school, instead of the private schools they have been attending. Now that they are fluent in a couple of languages, the private school is less important, they felt. At the high school level, they have better science facilities at the public school there, in fact. If you went to school later than the sixties in California, you missed the salad days. They used to be well run, clean, safe, and had the best test scores in the nation. But Grandpa didn't want to pay property taxes. So now along with paying for Grandpas social security, I'm paying for educating all the grand kids too, and their kids. It's a good thing my generation is mostly moderate to liberal, or we'd put Grandpa out on the street. Cheers, Chaz