Re: Education

[Hugh Haskell <hhaskell@MINDSPRING.COM>]

Jim Green wrote (along with a lot of other stuff):

[snip]

> On the other hand if the education money can be locked up in block grants,
> it will finally reach the students.

[snip]

While,  I don't agree with your basic thesis, most of that has been
covered. But this statement cannot be allowed to go unchallenged.
There is no guarantee whatever that block grants will "get to the
students" unless fairly strict controls are placed on how the money
can be used, just the contrary to the intent of block grants. They
will be able to be used for *anything* that the administrator of the
grant wants, including buying a  helicopter for the Superintendant of
Public Instruction or painting the Governor's office so it looks
nicer when he entertains the Secretary of Education. I agree that
getting the money to the classrooms is crucial  to the success of
education, but don't try to tell me that local school boards are any
good at that at all. What they are good at is creating bloated local
bureaucracies who spend their days creating endless rules and
regulations for the teachers to follow, while spending lavishly on
their own travel and professional development at the same time that
the teachers dig into their own pockets to pay for their professional
development, and in many cases for classroom materials.

In my area the school board has fiddled and dithered for years while
the condition of the schools deteriorated, and the  population grew
apace with few if any new schools built to accommodate the influx,
until now we face a    multi-hundred million dollar need for new and
improved schools, and our existing schools all have most of the free
land on their campuses taken up by trailer-classrooms to handle the
overflow, and cafeterias, gymnasiums and libraries are bursting at
the seams trying to handle the load. Practically every school in the
county is at 20% or more over design load.

And these are the people you want to entrust with a block grant from
the feds? Get real.

Hugh




--

Hugh Haskell
<mailto://hhaskell@mindspring.com>

Let's face it. People use a Mac because they want to, Windows because they
have to..
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