The State of Public Education

It doesn't take a lot to figure out that public education has been challenged in its ability to deliver everything to everyone. Many point to the 'education mafia' - the entrenched bureaucrats, unions and constituency groups that control the political and institutional agenda - as the reason at-risk kids don't succeed. Others both in and out of education point to the lack of funding for the mandates that have been added on over the past 50 years. There is definite truth to that - with special education funding being the most egregious example of underfunding.



What most of us don't realize is that 'special ed' has come to incorporate multiple disabilities that we didn't have names for when I was born. At that point, finding a cure for polio remained top priority for us. Now, if a student has ANY kind of behavioral issue that can be tied into a physiological or psychological aberration (and what can't?), the child is eligible - by law - for additional compensatory services to help improve the chance for academic and social success.



Much of this is justified, but we've gone well beyond the time when mental retardation or cerebro-muscular afflictions were the principal definitions of special education. Today, we have children who have been born to mothers with fetal alcohol syndrome or drug dependencies that alter normal development and can result in serious learning or behavioral issues.



The role of the public schools is to accept EVERYONE who comes through the door. To the extent that we do not do this, we are abdicating our principal responsibilities as a society - to raise our children and, in this country, to get them to the starting line of a meaningful and prosperous future based on our free enterprise system.



A lot is made of the failures of public schools, describing some as cesspools of declining student achievement - if at all; many argue that vouchers in the hands of parents will make all schools more 'competitive' in their approach to educational excellence and will allow the poorest among us to access the same benefits that are found in some of the best performing schools in the country.



While I have never been a big supporter of vouchers nor charter schools - there's still no evidence that they're any better than 'good' public schools, the time may be right for us to look at greater flexibility in the school system. Some chaos will be introduced because the K-12 combine has limited resources for things like transportation that are an essential underpinning to today's school choice models.



However, the only way education will ever become 'fully funded' is to give system critics some options that don't exist today in exchange for more dollars to address the kind of support that the most challenged students and schools need.



Next Time: Teachers - How Good Are They Really?