Reply to Why aren’t the Ws part of the consortiums?

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Reply to "Why aren’t the Ws part of the consortiums?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Again, the W schools get less money. They are spending the little they get to offer more because there is demand. Other schools that get more money might not have the demand for 6 languages. Or maybe they do, but their much larger pot of money is spent on other things those schools seem more important for their students. [/quote]

Totally misses the point.  Within a school district, there should be roughly equivalent quality of education available to each student.  That includes quality of teachers, quality of facilities, types of courses available, etc. You can point out inefficiencies, sure, but the fact that  W gets less per student to deliver the educational service is an artifact of the ease of delivery to that population in comparison to other populations in the district.

As it stands in MD, districts are basically equivalent to counties (Baltimore City, I think, is an exception), with elements from the US and state governments providing certain supports, regulation & funding -- that's the US Federal system for many things, not just education.  You can argue that a district should be broken up to serve only a particular HS pyramid.  Or that it should be enlarged so that the state (or country!) manages and delivers the service.  Or that it's OK to violate the equal protections clause of the Constitution.  Each of these would require a large political effort and likely would result in a county/society not so nice as currently exists, but, hey, you could go for it.

Or you could work to ensure that the funding (tax!) levels are enough so that, taking into account the need to provide that roughly equivalent service to all, there's enough to make that service level great, both at the Ws and elsewhere in the county.  There used to be a time when education funding measures (municipal bonds) were on the ballot, and they pretty much always passed.  It's been over 20 years since the County Council has regularly funded the MCPS need.  It's no wonder there are a lot of cracks in what was once a stellar educational system.  Not Fairfax of that time, perhaps, but close.  It's still pretty good, but not at the level it used to be.  Changing demographics have made things challenging, to be sure, but that has nearly always been the case in modern times in the DC area, and the factor is dwarfed by the effect of general underfunding.[/quote]

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