Education: July 2003 Archives
Debuting the new Education category, here's a fun little item about a new high school for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students in New York.
"This school will be a model for the country and possibly the world," Principal William Salzman said in an interview at the facility that will boast a new science lab, 60 laptop and desktop computers donated by IBM, additional classrooms and a new cafeteria.I think this is a great idea! If the school works out well, maybe we can create a whole parallel society for those people. They can have their own bathrooms and water fountains, their own special sections on the bus, and their own seperate neighborhoods. It'll be fabulous.Salzman, a former Wall Street executive, was most recently assistant principal of guidance and business information technology at Brooklyn's Automotive HS.
Salzman said Harvey Milk will be an academically rigorous school that follows Schools Chancellor Joel Klein's mandatory English and math programs. It will also specialize in computer technology, arts and a culinary program.
"This is a not a touchy-feely situation," Salzman said. "We intend to have 95 percent of our students go on to college. We have a lot of talent coming into the school. We want to steer these kids in the right direction."
Update:
Via Drudge I see that blacks want their own schools, too. Gosh, they complain no matter what we do.
I've written about some problems with the concept of public education, and I'm very pleased to read on Opinion Journal that the District of Columbia is poised to begin a voucher program. Amazingly, Democrat Diane Feinstein is on board, but some other Senators who had previously voted in favor of couchers have changed their minds.
Back in 1997, both Republican Arlen Specter and Democrat Mary Landrieu voted for D.C. vouchers, though the move was later vetoed by Bill Clinton.But now, at the moment of truth, with a president in the White House who has made clear his eagerness to make such a bill a reality, Sens. Specter and Landrieu upset a critical Appropriations Committee vote by switching from yea to nay. What makes their flip-flop especially nasty is that this move to undercut choice to the overwhelmingly black and Latino students of the district comes from two white senators who each chose private schools for their own children.
Even a child can spot the contradiction. Outside the committee's meeting room last week, nine-year-old Mosiyah Hall, a D.C. public school student himself, politely asked Sen. Landrieu where she sent her own children to school. "Georgetown Day," came the response, a reference to one of Washington's most exclusive private schools. Mosiyah's mother says an obviously agitated Sen. Landrieu then came over to a group of local mothers to explain that a voucher would be no help for them here, because even with the $7,500 voucher this bill offers, they still couldn't afford Georgetown Day.
"It was an ugly moment," says Virginia Walden-Ford, head of D.C. Parents for School Choice and one of the moms demonstrating.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: the government has no business being involved with education. Not the federal government, not the state government, not even the local government (although that would be the least objectionable).
Vouchers are a step in the right direction, but ultimately the education system will need to be privatized if it's ever going to produce capable and effective workers and citizens. Government does almost everything poorly and inefficiently. It's not any one person or party's fault, it's just the nature of the beast. Washington DC, spends more per student than the highest-spending state ($15,122 for DC, $12,454 for New Jersey, $8,521 average for America), yet DC students are the worst readers in the country -- even worse than non-native English speakers from Guam, the Virgin Islands and American Samoa! California's school system is all screwed up too, and not for lack of funding.
The government bureaucracy has failed, and demonstrated that it is incapable of handling the essential task of educating the next generation. Won't somebody think of the children?
It was only a matter of time. UC eyes surcharge for rich students. Next thing you know, the state will start charging rich people more to ride the bus. Why should rich people get to borrow library books for free? Why should rich people pay the same for trash pickup as poor people? In fact, I think rich people should have to pay a poll tax to vote; why not, they can afford it!
Regent Matt Murray, the lone student on the 25-person governing board, said he supports a surcharge and lashed out at the state's Republican legislators who have resisted tax increases intended to offset the budget deficit.Hold on, is the goal to raise money to deal with the "ridiculous" budget situation, or to "make sure the university is accessible to all kinds of students of all kinds of backgrounds"? Obviously the only way this plan would affect accessibility is if it makes the UC system too expensive for certain "rich" people to afford. But that undermines the whole "they're rich, they can afford it" "argument" brought up earlier in the article. I can see why this proposal is so attractive to California leftists: they get to raise extra money for the government at no political cost to themselves, and they get to socially engineer the composition of the University's student body."Given the ridiculous nature of the budget situation and the limited options the university has, I think it is wise to pursue the idea," he said. "The goal is to make sure the university is accessible to all kinds of students of all kinds of backgrounds."
I'm not terribly surprised that Matt Murray is a Moron (he's the co-founder and president of the Berkeley American Civil Liberties Union).
Sigh, I'm reduced to using Reuters "scare quotes".
