Reply #211: Nationally, the cost for each public school student

[sulphurdunn]

works out to about $5 per hour. That cost covers all school operations: salaries, infrastructure, transportation, materials, records etc. The kids where I teach can use the $200 calculators just fine. Most of them can do things with computers I never knew was possible. Their critically thinking skills are no better or worse than when I was an adolescent in the 60s.

Cassandras have been wringing their hands over the obvious shortcomings of compulsory K-12 education since we started doing it. I have a book in my library somewhere, bemoaning the failure of public education, written in 1954 (the same year as Brown v. Board of Education). And, of course, no list of anti-public education tomes would be complete without "A Nation at Risk", the mother of our present school reform movement from which one could have inferred that American schools would never have produced the people necessary to launch the computer age or lead global breakthroughs in telecommunications technology and medical science.

The real issue that "education reform" has with public schools has never been so much with the curriculum and teachers as with integration and inclusiveness. The key to making public schools better is not privatization and the inevitable return to segregation by class and income that would cause. It is social justice.