Anthony West wrote:
Your three points of argument are usefully clarified. Maybe now we all
can begin to talk more cleanly about each of them, apart from the others.
It does seem like the Penn-assisted school had to be subsidized; the
jury is still out on whether it needed a university to do that job.
Perhaps Chrysler or Kim Jong-Il or la Cosa Nostra or Al Krigman would
have done an equally good job with PAS, if they too had spent an extra
$1000/pupil on it atop the local public-school budget. The experiments
needed to tease out these truths lie further down the line, I think.
Even if it was subsidized, I think we still learn something from the
experiment so far. In some cases, it's clearly possible to achieve
strong gains in urban public schools with only modest extra
expenditures. Since future system-wide budget gains may be modest at
best, any model that might lead to a bigger bang-per-buck ratio is worth
exploring further.
Your second point is flagrantly false and ill-informed, because *all*
public elementary schools in Philadelphia require a catchment area drawn
around them. Therefore, by definition, PAS's catchment area cannot be
"special". Catchment areas are standard government issue.
No one single model for public education can be available yet. If we
demand only single, one-size-fits-all solutions for the plight of urban
schools, we probably won't contribute much to its solution. In this age,
we need lots of models and lots of possible solutions. But we do need
good across-the-board metrics by which to evaluate them all fairly.
I never said we needed a one-size fits all solution. I said
maybe it's time to start looking at public schools not as
vegetable stands, but as places that prepare us for life --
inside and outside the marketplace. I hope now you realize
that your original market approach to an 'egalitarian'
public school system relies upon maintained inequalities, by
definition, and that your pointing to a school that relied
on tailor-made market tactics wasn't helpful.
..................
UNIVERSITY*CITOYEN
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