Thanks for prodding, Ray. Many thoughts surface, mostly off the cuff.
Short of a national system of public education,/ à la France,/ it's
impossible to imagine fully equitable public education. Even there, no
one thinks the schooling delivered to the /HLMs/ in the /faubourgs/ are
really doing a proper job for the French underclass. So it's not clear
anyone has the answer to your question.
Therefore, no single family can be expected to take the weight of
system-fixing on its shoulders. A school-age child forces one into
experiential activism rather than ideological activism. You get 12
years, 16 years to do your job and that's it. So you work with the
schools that are before you at the time, and do what you have to do.
Your future is now.
One of Hughes' bright ideas was that if outcome measurements are posted
on every school in the system, then every parent has a new tool to shop
around for the best catchment area they can afford (or finagle).
Mobility, like most other human attributes, is unequally distributed.
But rich, poor and middle classes alike have access to it. /Homo sapiens
/has been migrating across the landscape to take advantage of
opportunities for 150,000 years. Mobility for the poor in the inner city
is pretty easy, compared to elsewhere.
The chief challenge to equal opportunity is posed at ES/MS levels,
because they are stringently neighborhood-based in Philadelphia. The
best way to mitigate the effects of catchment areas would be
affordable-housing set-asides, either by zoning or other tricks.
The best way to reduce the relationship between good neighborhood
schools and high real-estate prices ... is to make more good
neighborhood schools! When they are a rare commodity, obviously people
will bid up residences within their boundaries. The more schools there
are that start turning in good numbers, the lower the premium any one
catchment area can command.
That requires funding. And funding requires two things: (a) politicking
and (b) class diversity. Philadelphia suffers from a strikingly-abnormal
class ratio that is not representative of our society as a whole. This
governmental jurisdiction is overweighted with citizens in the bottom
income tercile, at the expense of people in the upper two terciles. This
city needs to build up the proportion of its residents that are
middle-income or prosperous, so its educational institutions can tap the
tax base they need -- and also tap the advocates they need. Typically,
blue-collar communities push for public-safety spending; middle-class
communities push for educational spending. Here, the poor need the
less-poor to help them. But the less-poor won't move in unless they get
what they need, in their judgement.
There definitely is such a thing as a jurisdiction that has too few poor
folks and too many rich folks. But that is not Philadelphia's problem.
And nothing that is being done by anybody in University City today has
the slightest chance of turning Philadelphia into an "overly-rich" city
for some time to come.
-- Tony West
of course, I wasn't advising you to leave, I was prodding you into
explaining how one is to deal with the inequitable delivery of/access
to quality public education in the city. hope is always fine, but in
the meantime not everyone is in an equal position where they can
afford to wait and see, nor is everyone in an equal position of
mobility "when something new and better comes down the pike." thoughts?
..................
UNIVERSITY*CITOYEN
