Reply to Hogan Expanding State-Funded Scholarships to Private Schools

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
Why not improve the public schools in low income areas instead of selecting a small number of kids to go to private school? It's window dressing---it's the easy way out. Instead, we should demand that ALL public schools provide a high quality education.

[/quote]

That would be fine, too, except year after year it doesn't happen.

I don't think it's any coincidence that in Baltimore County the majority of the schools that lack AC are the ones with poorer/more minority children. No, it's not "all the rich kids have AC and none of the poor kids do" because they can't be that blatant. But it's pretty obvious that the areas with more political pull get the benefits first, and everyone else comes last.

Year after year, we pretend that we don't have schools with great test scores and great facilities just a few miles away from schools with poor test scores and poor facilities. We pretend it has absolutely nothing to do with wealthy single family homes providing the students for one school, and poorer apartments and single-head-of-household homes providing the students for another school. We pretend we're liberal and open hearted and the second someone suggests shifting boundaries to make the situations more equitable for the children we scream because Property Values! (And college. But I think the property values screams are louder.) We don't offer paths to let kids into public schools that would serve them perfectly, we force them to stay in their zoned schools. And we're ok with that. For whatever reasons. But the second someone comes in and offers what might be an escape hatch in the form of a voucher? Why, that's just wrong!

We've been contributing to the educational neglect of these kids for decades. Maybe it's time to try something else. Maybe this will motivate all of us to make sure that all of our kids have access to an appropriate education and a safe educational environment. But I expect many of us will just enjoy complaining bitterly about that mean old gov.[/quote]

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