Reply #61: What have they been spending that money on? How much more money per student are we talking about?

[MadHound]

If they've been spending that money on metal detectors and security guards, that will not entice the best teachers to work there. And frankly, how much more money per student are they spending. Inner city and troubled schools need a lot of help. ESL classes, remidial classes, health care, high quality counseling, on and on the list goes. Yet if you do this, if you make these commitments, you will have a better school and better students as a result.

However with private schools, you quality of education is frequently worse than that of public schools. Since these schools are run as a for profit operation, corners are cut, teachers are even more grossly underpaid, many facilities are second rate, and in an overwhelming number of cases, religious dogma has a prominent place in the curriculum. Is this what you really want? This is what the drive towards vouchers, the first step towards privatizing all education, is all about.

NCLB is also another front in the war on public schools. Insane, one size fits all standards, with no funding provided for it, NCLB is designed not to hold teachers or schools truly accountable, but rather to set impossible standards that an increasing number schools won't be able to meet. Thus, declaring our public school system a failure, the government will hand out more and more vouchers, funnelling our children into private, mostly religious schools.
NCLB is just another way of draining our schools dry in order to line the pockets of poor quality, mostly religious private schools.

One other thing for you to consider also. How do they measure progress at these inner city schools? Do they take into account the cultural, language, and socioeconomic differences, or are the still using the one size fits all, middle class WASP assessment tools? They way an assessment is done, whether or not is takes into account various cultural and SES differences makes a huge difference in how well a student does on such assessment tests.
This has been show time and again, yet sadly, with NCLB and other such one size fits all assessments are still quite common.

Are public schools free of problems, by no means. Will simply throwing money at the problems solve them? No, you have to be selective in your money use, and also be prepared to spend a lot of money on certain targeted schools. But doing such is well worth it, to provide a high quality, free education for all of our students. The alternative, lower quality, religiously dominated private schooling is unthinkable.