Reply to Are we fools not to play lottery for our 3 y o?

Forum Index » DC Public and Public Charter Schools

Reply to "Are we fools not to play lottery for our 3 y o?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I agree, running those ^^ numbers will answer those questions.  And those are exactly the questions to ask/numbers to run.

But for the sake of this minute though, given what we know as ballpark numbers of kids who pre-charter would have been in crappy schools, and post-charters are in good-to-great schools, isn't it still a fair question for this conversation today to ask what would have been better for those kids instead of charters?  Isn't that still a fair question even without the exact numbers?[/quote]
I agree it's a fair question, but this conversation will be informed by the worldview of your conversation partner. From what I observed, the extremes of this continuum are like this:

Extreme 1.  I am a responsible parent who cares deeply about education of my children. I pay taxes. I am therefore entitled to receive a good product (i.e. public education) for the taxes I pay. If the local school board fails to provide me with this, I will investigate my alternatives and pick the one that provides my child with the best educational option.  In this scenario, the parent is the consumer, the education is a commodity they consume, and their choices are guided by finding the best product to consume. Welfare of other children is simply not a consideration. They have parents of their own, let them figure it out. My concern is my child, full stop.

Extreme 2. I am a responsible parent who cares deeply about education of my children, but also deeply concerned about structural failures in the system.  I feel bad about saving my child but leaving everyone else in the fetid pool of bad education system. I am going to invest my energies, beyond the taxes I pay, to improving the local schools, even if this results in my child getting a worse education than they would have received elsewhere.  In this scenario, parental time and energy as well as education aptitude of the child are simply resources to be spread around public schools without regard for the immediate benefit of these resources (i.e. it's OK to send an academically able child from a high SES family to a failing school because it's good for poor uneducated children to be around high-SES educated children - crude but true reflection.)[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics