From: mwertz1@cc.swarthmore.edu (Melanie Wertz)
Subject: Re: Family Leave
Organization: Dispatchers
Distribution: usa
Date: Sat, 26 Sep 1992 17:02:21 GMT

In article <1992Sep25.175925.9328@anasazi.com>, best@anasazi.com (Mike
Best) writes:

> I think you have well argued the socialist side of this issue, that equality
> is the just goal.  What this really means is that to be equal we need to 
> bring the bottom up and, this is the important point, bring the top down.
> There is no other way to acheive an average, and in the end your scheme
> has produced just that - average schools.

I disagree.  I'm not a socialist and I'm not making a socialist argument at
all.  The goal is not "equality," whatever that means, but *quality
education.*  If school choice is failing to secure quality education then
we need a new policy, plain and simple.  As  I said before putting schools
in competition may give incentive, but incentive is useless unless schools
are given help and support in trying to improve themselves.

> I think that
> giving parents the choice is more honorable than your version of
> government coercion.

I am all for choice, Mike, when the choices are real, but school "choice"
is a misnomer for Bush's proposed policy.  For instance, underacheiving
children, who are generally urban poor, who often have a language or
dialect barrier, who may have problems with drugs or pregnancy, who often
have to work long hours outside of school to support their families, who
feel alienated from a system which stigmatizes them and fails to meet their
needs, will attend the only schools that have standards low enough so as
not to flunk them out and turn them to the streets, i.e. the inner city
schools.  Meanwhile, privileged children will continue to get excellent
educations.  

The point is, school choice overlooks and ignores the real problems facing
education today.  School choice does nothing to solve problems of dropouts,
drug abuse, poverty, pregnancy, violence.  It doesn't apply any new
strategies or priorities about HOW WE TRY TO EDUCATE, it just redistributes
where people get it.  The failure of our schools is not the result of
changed policies; schools have remained about the same.  What's changed is
the student body.  Over the last thirty years, blacks, hispanics,
foreigners, the underclass have been given greatly increased access to
education, but the system has not accomodated their needs.  Under Bush's
policy, the education system will further ignore those needs.

> In order to maintain that 
> population it might be necessary to bus (yikes!) children to public 
> schools - is bussing now immoral?  Seems to me that the liberals were
> all for it when it fit their ends - what goes around comes around.

Bussing has nothing to do with my (or most of "the liberals'") feelings
about school choice; that's not the point at all.  Are you attacking my
arguments or just attacking a generalized political orientation?  The issue
here is not "liberalism" but a firm belief (at least on my part) that every
human being is valuable and deserves to be empowered by a good education.

Melanie
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