Barbaric Yawp

Actually, it's more like a barbaric yawn. You know, a really loud one.

So I've recently realized that I often feature opinion articles in the guise of news, and make no distinction between them and news stories. It seems that news and opinion bleed together these days anyway, but I'll try now to do a better job of distinguishing them for you.

Today in the Washington Post, conservative columnist George Will wrote about school choice at Sumner Elementary School, the historical landmark famous for rejecting Linda Brown in 1950 from enrolling, thus leading to the Brown vs. Board of Education decision. Will compares the rejection of Linda Brown by Sumner then to the school board's rejection now of a charter school that wishes to use the now closed school facility.

While the comparison is obviously one designed to provoke, Will does make an interesting point that liberal activists such as the ACLU are often behind opposition to charter schools. I think the liberal view stems from two ideological points: 1) public schools which serve all should be the principle recipients of state/federal funding for education, rather than a loosely-supervised network of sectarian, non-sectarian, and other schools; and 2) the funding that might go to sectarian schools would violate the separation of church and state that while it is not in the Constitution per se, is protected as many see by the First Amendment clause that the state shall establish no religion.

What the liberal activists don't acknowledge is that minority groups underserved by the public school systems in many areas have a strong desire to have more school choice. The system as it is established now makes it so the only people who benefit from the best public schools schools are those who can afford the property taxes to live in those districts, and the upper echelon don't even bother with the public schools, regardless of the high property tax they pay. They send their kids to private schools where they can mingle with others like themselves.

My issue with charter schools and school choice at the moment is that small schools don't allow for diverse subjects to be taught, because the schools just don't have the resources. So which subjects suffer? Art, music, and foreign language. Plus the evidence is inconclusive that small schools work better; this article from Business Week about a Gates Foundation funded school outside of Denver provides an interesting case study.

That's my thought for this morning. Back to being the fall guy for professors who don't want to let students into their classes, and to being told I can't go to the bathroom by my professor. What a life. I can't wait to have a real job.

"A Tide for School Choice." (Will, G. The Washington Post. Thursday, Feb. 1, 2007. Page A15.)