The U.S. Department of Education apparently thinks it is more important to fund government lawyers than it is to educate children. Such is the state of education in the age of Obama.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced that his organization of 600 rights enforcers will examine schools for things like access to advanced placement classes for Latino and African American students. These ‘enforcers’ have a budget of $103 million.
Let’s review this: $103 million spent to fight discrimination because not enough Latino and African American kids are getting into AP classes and later into college. Therefore, it must be discrimination.
Anyone see the news lately? Read any stories about massive cuts to education spending?
Further, as George Will points out:
“Plainly put, the best predictor of a school’s performance is family performance — qualities of the families from which the students come. Subsequent research suggests that about 90 percent of the differences among the proficiency of schools can be explained by five factors: days absent from school, hours spent watching television, pages read for homework, the quantity and quality of reading matter in the home — and the presence of two parents in the home.”
Message to Mr. Duncan and staff: Take your $103 million away from your lawyers and fund teachers and schools to help those kids overcome their broken households and lack of parental involvement in education. In other words, use your money to educate, not litigate. Education will set those kids free.
Educate, don’t litigate. Has a nice ring to it. Think it’ll catch on?
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So what will happen if they find less than adequate representation of minorites in AP classes. Please amplify.
So let’s just run out and spend the money rather than understand the problem? George Will seems to think that correlates amount to explanation. So TV viewing, school attendance, having two parents are affecting performance, fair enough. Are those the only factors, or just the ones that fit with his ideological leanings? Even so, what explanations are there for differences in those factors? Families with parents working late shift, or that have been affected by drugs and untreated mental illness, for example, will have difficulty putting these measures in place. Schools with sytematically low expectations of minority children may communicate their lack of interest, assign less homework and provide fewer reading materials. If systematic bias is affecting performance, it would be important to find out, since extra money to the system would be likely to wind up being diverted from those who need it.
My belief is that the big problem with education is how we pay for it, not necessarily how much. Local financing means that school systems with high property values (and therefore taxes) have more money for education. There’s no ownership in the suburbs of the inner-city schools that aren’t performing, although our workforce will come from those schools, too.