My column today has invited some interesting email, perhaps none more so (for me) than this quite salty note from one of my longest-reading liberal readers:
So it’s the schools that suck, not the values of the fractured families who send their kids there?
I went to ghetto schools through sixth grade. The brick walls and the tattered books didn’t make any difference. I did fine. My classmates grew up to have their mugshots available for my perusal when I was asked at age 20 to identify the guy who robbed me at gunpoint while I was working in a Baskin-Robbins during college break.
I submit to you that it’s all about values. Isn’t that pure conservative philosophy? My parents convinced me that it was critically important to try my hardest and to succeed in school. Their parents basically copulated, spawned, and left their kids to grow up on the streets. I was there. It happened.
I certainly agree that the most important variable is parental involvement (sorry Derb). If you have smart dedicated parents determined to raise educated kids, you’ll get educated no matter where you go to school. The best example of course being the enormous success of homeschooling (See this recent piece in the S.F. Chronicle, for example.
But not everyone can homeschool and if everyone did homeschool the aggregate benefits of homeschooling would plummet because you’d have parents ill-qualified and under-motivated doing it. And you can call me a Tory or a Socialist if you like, but it seems pretty obvious that the state has a compelling interest in educating kids. The question therefore is means, not ends. And I think the case for public schools as a means is far from persuasive. The question isn’t how do you keep good public schools good. Those schools aren’t good because of some brilliant public policies, they’re good because parents insist they be good and because they are in districts which lend themselves to good schooling. If you abolished public schools tomorrow, it’s hardly as if the newly privatized schools would become Thunderdomes overnight.
So the real question is how do you limit the damage done by the public education bureaucratic priesthood, particularly in large cities? And I think the surest way to do it is to crush the monopoly and allow those parents eager to do better by their children to escape to institutions where parents can have some real influence. Yes, some kids would be left behind under my scheme of things, but a heck of a lot fewer than under the current regime.
Will this happen, not bloody likely.