Report Card
Times Union
In your
March 31 editorial ‘New York’s report card’, it
was encouraging to read that “simply throwing more
money at the problem” will not lead to better school
results as “many advocates of reform” (including
your own editorials) “have proposed in the past”.
But then you contradict your own observations with
“state lawmakers must address” the problem by
“overhauling the school aid formula”, as if throwing
more money at the problem will lead to better results.
Just look at
the Albany city schools. They spend more than their
suburban counterparts precisely because of the school
aid formulas. Yet these students still under-perform
those in suburban schools.
If the
‘poor’ city schools can outspend the ‘rich’
suburban schools the performance gap is not in funding.
Let me again refer to Albany. Consider the recent news
reports about the boy going into 9th grade
not knowing how to read. It’s astounding!
How much school aid was wasted to ‘educate’
this student? Yet,
the school did not care enough or do enough to prevent
this expensive travesty.
It is even
more alarming for the parents of this child to be so
disinterested for 9 years as to be unaware the son
can’t read until somebody told them. Where have these
parents been? How
much could the parents have cared? For how much of this
travesty are the parents responsible?
Is the boy
without blame? If the boy had cared enough he would have
learned to read in spite of his teachers and his
parents.
State
lawmakers can’t legislate personal effort and
responsibility - no matter the aid formula. Why fund the
charade if the teachers don’t care and the parents
don’t care and the students don’t care? The irony is
that the worse the results the more money we’re
expected to throw at them to improve. If I could get
more for doing less, that is just what I’d keep on
doing.
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