Steve hits a grand slam on vouchers
steve u. said...
It is an odd leap to conclude that this bill is hostile to public education. Along with helping families seek educational options that they believe are best for their children, the bill pushes increased money to public education, which will be accompanied by historic levels of overall funding. Hardly the barbarians at the gate.I look forward to the proposals the first commentor promised. Public education officials seem to be spending far too much time looking over the fence at the way 3 to 7% of Utah children will be educated elsewhere and not nearly enough time on the 93 to 97% of Utah children for which they have direct responsibility. If Chairman Burningham has innovative ideas for improving public education – other than guarding the status quo and fighting against anyone leaving the system – I’d like to hear them.
4 comments:
Two years ago you were against vouchers. What happened?
I do hope we can actually get PAST vouchers and talk about some REAL solutions rather than just politically motivated ones.
Maybe someone can give me a voucher to help subsidize me so I can have the "choice" to have a child. AFter all, I'm subsidizing their supposed "lack" of choice.
If it is an "odd leap" to conclude the bill is hostile to education, it is an "odd" leap to me to link the funding and vouchers together, indeed a blatant one.
Often I hear that education has changed too much from voucher liberals and that it needs to go back to what it once was. Then on the other hand, voucher liberals say that the "status quo" is being guarded and education hasn't changed enough. Interesting.
Let's put up a SEPARATE fund for vouchers if the politicos feel we need them and then use a combination of that and private sector money. There IS plenty of that out there.
Vouchers are hardly innovative. They ARE to exploit a political agenda. I'd like to hear something besides the tired lines, "it will create greater competitions and thus help public schools." They're about getting kids out of the "system" and getting back at those terrible teachers' unions who are responsible for every ill that goes on in Utah (note based on conversations with many, many, many voucher supporters--what I hear in private and public are two different things).
How about working to strengthen neighborhood schools and help them to become more community oriented. Would not that school be more "accountable" if everyone realized they had a stake. We can work to sharply reduce federal government interference, provide parent reading tutoring programs, look at putting in gifted/talented specialists at many elementaries, ensure funding for reading specialists for each school and math if needed, develop more private grants and help teachers and schools be more aware of them, use private sector businesses to help provide services (e.g. music/dance classes), have guest speakers from the community come in and speak about different topics, have merit pay for schools that work to involve the community and involve parents more, have each school develop a parent involvement plan, work to have MUCH LESS micromanagement of schools by state government, SHARPLY reduce paperwork required of special educators, reward and recognize schools that make great academic strides, look at the many quality programs and students we DO have in our schools, have tax incentives for businesses who "adopt" a school, involve engineers and scientists in coming into classrooms, involve physics professors in designing and supplementing high school physics curriculums, develop greater numbers of internships for high school students to gain real world experience, have architects and other blue and white collar professionals come in and share information about their jobs, have teachers make greater efforts to contact parents and involve them in the classroom, have private sector artists come in and teach art classes, increase artist-in-residences, look for more NON-TAX and STABLE funding resources for education, expand the Junior Achievement program, have parents and others form education groups in each city of a district so that people can talk about what is working and what is not and pool efforts to solve problems in THAT city, utilize retirees and others to come into schools, develop good reading incentives for children who progress significantly in reading, give cities more of a say in at least some educational policy, give individual schools greater flexibility in how they teach a subject, develop programs to increase and strengthen teacher morale, look for SOLUTIONS AND WORKING TOGETHER rather than just criticizing and emphasizing the negative, have elementary schools develop after school enrichment programsm and so on and so on and so on.
These are just a few of my own ideas. I have many more. And YES I am a teacher. I actually have tried or am trying many of these ideas. And many are working. I still have a long way to go to do what I want to, but I'm trying.
Having all of the politics doesn't help. I'm tired of special interest groups dictating educational policy (on both sides). We need to sit down and discuss what we can do to make EACH school a CHOICE school. We can actually increase the choices available for everyone without having all the politics and combativeness that seems so ever present now.
You have heard them Steve, you just dismiss them and continue to strong-arm anyone who gets in your way.
Things need to be focused on helping ALL schools to offer a good choice of educational programs, being community-oriented, working together, cooperativeness, and so on. Promoting self-interests and negativity doesn't accomplish this.
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