“…defending affirmative action is the wrong fight. Latino and African-Americans should worry less about the admissions policies of college X or university Y and more about the everyday practices at elementary and secondary schools in this country. What should concern them is that so many public schools fail so dismally at educating minority students that relatively few will ever be in a position to benefit from affirmative action in the first place”. –Ruben Navarrette Jr.
May4th2005
Harvard educated Navarette needs to realize that there are plenty of Latinos concerned about K-12 education. Some of us see the fight on different fronts, not a matter of which one is wrong and which one is right. If we only have 25 African American men in the freshman class at a large public institution, I think it’s perfectly fine for people to be concerned about that and fight for admissions reform.
If you look at those who favor affirmative action, especially those who strongly favor affirmative action, 99 times out of 100 the same people will focus primarily on higher level educational problems and have very outdated solutions to K-12 problems. They will either support some dubious after school program or push for more money for public schools, both being the same solutions that were being pushed 30 years ago, and both having very low results.
What Navarette is saying is that the emphasis should be on the big prize, the K-12 , where we lose most of our people. Interestingly, it is primarily those who reject affirmative action that primarily focus on the K-12 level of education, pushing for true reform.
Vouchers, True Reform? if only it was that simple.
There certainly is no magic bullet with our educational problem, but vouchers does show to be the best solution currently on the table.
Beware of vouchers!! As an educator, I have been following the history of vouchers since they were last trotted out during the early ’90’s. They always sound great, until one reads the fine print. So you get a voucher from the government to educate your child in the amount of $10,000. a year, only to discover that any decent school’s tuition is $15,000. per year. Anyone can open up a school - it just takes 20 students and these schools may not be accrediated! Plus, they will not require credenntialed teachers. I think the voucher idea is designed to end free public schooling, and if you don’t have that extra $5,000 where are your kids going to go to school? What a great way to segregate people and keep “certain” groups out of the certain voucher schools.
“accrediated” should read “accreditated” and “credenntialed” should read “credentialed” Sorry, G.
George, can you show me some sources for what you mention?
The reason I ask is what you say contradicts reality, for example, read this.
But let’s assume for the moment that what you say is true, I don’t believe it but for the sake of argument, let’s assume it is true. Instead of arguing against vouchers on this basis, one could simply argue that the voucher to parents should increase, afterall, Democrats are always fighting for increased funding for education, so I am sure they should be willing to increase it for a system that empowers the parent. As far as basic credentials goes, one could simply ask for basic credentials to be implemented in a voucher system.
Remember George, the heart of vouchers is not the amount of money to parents, or the amount of credentials the school system has, it is competition. Competition in a system that is currently a monopoly, a government monopoly at that. So unless your criticism of vouchers rebuts that, the criticism doesn’t go far enough to disprove vouchers.
HP how many of those short list’s of studies have been submitted to peer review?
Quite a few actually, in fact, many of them are supported by Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize winner in Economics, and Caroline Huxby, professor of Economics at Harvard.