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PROFILES

I have a question for suburban residents fighting against educational reform—school choice, charter schools, vouchers, revisions in the tenure system. Which category are you in?

Guilt: the past abhorrent treatment of minorities has led you to “help” the “oppressed” by lowering the academic bar so that students can “succeed” and gain the “self-esteem” so necessary to succeed in life. The result in urban education: a 50% freshman to senior drop-out rate, with a majority of the graduates requiring remedial education as their first courses in college.  Your participation in racial dialogue is the monthly diversity lunch which lists all manner of ills to be confronted by others.

Closet Racist: Probably 80% of the minorities you interact with are in subservient jobs—and that is fine with you—you treat them nicely and after all, somebody has to do those tasks and why not the underschooled. Besides, if they were educated, they would compete with your kids, who we both know are already somewhat spoiled and frequently lazy.

Ignorant and Blissful: No fault of your own, you are not aware of the perfect correlation between family income and SAT scores, which leads you to be blissfully unaware of whether your precious school is adding any educational value at all. Since you have the time and money to be involved in your child’s education, much of which takes place outside of the classroom without you even thinking of it as education (trips to museums and abroad, etc.), you have this naïve belief that if parents everywhere were simply more interested in their children’s education, reform efforts would be unnecessary.

Your exercise of school choice was moving to an area where the “schools were better.” You do not realize that people elsewhere, with thinner wallets, simply want an analogous opportunity to exercise school choice.

Frustrated and Conflicted: You are aware of the quantitative and qualitative aspects of the education problem, and, on reflection over a Starbucks cappuccino, you and your friends have decided there is nothing you can do to change things, other than writing a check to ease the pain of frustration. You stay committed to family and job and remain apart from the need for controversy and dirty fingernails. You are rendered numb by the variety and scope of the tsunamis and big rocks confronting America at this point.

Proposal: Here is my request: enroll your children in a conventional urban school system—one where your child must attend the school building within your geographic zone, where showing up for school equals passing, and where many teachers work with an eye on the 2:32pm union mandated end-of-day clock. Then tell me how you feel about education reform.

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