Admiral Rockwell Tory
Diamond Member
Great! Write up a way to make this work and submit a proposal to your Congressman. I can hear the howls of laughter now!
You want to tear down 150 years of public education because you don't like the outcomes in our inner-city schools which are dominated by poor and minorities. That very bigoted of you!
The reason that no one has done this is because most voucher programs fail to change society. Here is an example. I taught in a middle school located in a small town right outside a military base. Over 50% were military dependents living in the community. The other 50% were poor kids from the housing projects. Guess which students succeeded and which of them failed. We ranked about average in the state.
I then moved to another middle school in the inner city. The entire population were "hood" poor or immigrants from numerous foreign countries. The "white/Hispanic population of the school was about 10% and guess which students succeeded and which one's failed? That school ranked dead last in the entire state, even though it was a magnet school for boys. The 10% came from the magnet program and did not live in that neighborhood. At least half of my students did not speak English. I taught the same boys for two years as I switched subjects from math to social studies as they moved up a year. Nothing changed.
Why could I achieve much greater results in the first school than the second school? Different demographics of the students was the reason. Society failed the second group, not the teachers. In fact, I was not the only teacher who taught in both schools. My carpool buddy was also a teacher at both schools. She taught 8th grade math all three years we were together. I taught math for one and social studies world history for two more. The last two years we taught the same students. The students who failed her math classes failed my social studies class with exactly zero exceptions.
We moved later and wound up together again at a suburban high school teaching math in a middle-class neighborhood with almost no minorities and a moderate level of income. Guess which school was one of the best in the state?
Same teachers, two different subjects at times, three different schools, three different results.
Did you ever hear the saying, "You can't make chicken salad out of chicken shit"? In those certain schools, we make awful tasting chicken salad because the parents and society are providing us nothing but chicken shit to work with an occasional leg or thigh thrown in for flavoring depending on the demographics.
Private schools will not change the students. You are merely rearranging the deck chairs after the Titanic has already collided with the iceberg. They are going down anyway, whether it is public, private, charter or parochial.
