Here’s why it should work: my nephew, Tyler, went to a
public school in New York City. But before you conjure up the visions of a
greying, decaying public school—complete with the boarded-up windows—you should
know that this was Stuyvesant High School.
And what’s so special about that? Well, Wikipedia
provides part of the answer:
Stuyvesant High School /ˈstaɪvəsənt/,
commonly referred to as Stuy /ˈstaɪ/,[7] is one of the nine Specialized High
Schools in New York City. Operated by the New York City
Department of Education, these schools offer tuition-free accelerated
academics to city residents. The only way to be admitted into most of the
Specialized High Schools, including Stuyvesant, is to take the Specialized High
Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT). Stuyvesant traditionally holds the
highest cutoff score out of the Specialized High Schools; each November, over
28,000 eighth and ninth graders take the 21⁄2-hour exam,
and roughly 800 students (less than 3% of applicants) are accepted annually.
So Tyler had done well—but did Stuy do well by
Tyler? The answer is yes and no—since Tyler went on to go to an excellent
university and then to Colombia for a master’s degree. But Stuy did have a
little problem, in the form of a physics teacher from China or India whose
accent was so thick that nobody could understand him. Nor was that the only
problem: there were stories of teachers drunk in class, of mediocre lectures,
of the academic laziness and boredom that afflict the average American high
school. What made Stuy great? The students, not the teachers. Merely by being
so exclusive, it attracted the finest students.
News flash—brilliant students don’t need brilliant
teachers: they’ll thrive in the rockiest soil. Who needs good teachers? Kids
for whom television has been their primary window to the world, not kids who,
like Tyler, could identify a Monet haystack at the age of six. That’s how often
he had been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art….
So I should be for it, shouldn’t I? Because look, if
I had shown up drunk for work at Wal-Mart, they would have marched me down to
Human Resources and fired me. Why should a New York City schoolteacher be
allowed to hold on to a job, just because he has tenure?
And I should be proud of my state, the great state
of Wisconsin, which twenty-five years ago did something that I found chilling
at the time, and still do. Here’s what one
writer, Christopher Fons, has to say:
25
years ago the Bradley Foundation and a number of other right wing “free market”
oriented think tanks convinced the Republican Governor Tommy Thompson, a
majority of Republicans, “New Democrats” like Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist and
a few Democratic Black Nationalist legislators like Polly Williams that it was
time to help the poor of Milwaukee by allowing them to accept state money to
attend private or charter schools instead of their neighborhood schools.
The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program initially allowed a
few hundred low-income students to participate in the program. Today the
program has expanded to over 28,000 students and the means test for getting a
voucher is $78,000 if the student’s parents are married. The last Wisconsin
budget also expanded the program state-wide and allows a tax deduction of
$10,000 if your child goes to a private high school and a $4,000 deduction for
an elementary school student.
Wisconsin,
in short, is leading the country in using public money to pay for private
schools. Here’s the scheme: identify a “failing” school, close it down if it
doesn’t improve, and then give parents vouchers for them to spend in the
charter school of their choice. And listen to Steve Jobs, if you need
convincing:
The problem is bureaucracy. I'm one of these people who believes
the best thing we could ever do is go to the full voucher system.
I have a 17-year-old daughter who went to a private school for a
few years before high school. This private school is the best school I've seen
in my life. It was judged one of the 100 best schools in America. It was
phenomenal. The tuition was $5,500 a year, which is a lot of money for most
parents. But the teachers were paid less than public school teachers - so it's
not about money at the teacher level. I asked the state treasurer that year
what California pays on average to send kids to school, and I believe it was
$4,400. While there are not many parents who could come up with $5,500 a year,
there are many who could come up with $1,000 a year.
If we gave vouchers to parents for $4,400 a year, schools would
be starting right and left. People would get out of college and say,
"Let's start a school."
Hard
to argue with Steve, right? But then again, the thought does cross the mind
that any child of Steve Jobs will get a good education. Why? Because Jobs will not
have parked his kid in front of a TV for the first five years of the kid’s
life; neither will Jobs be feeding his kid fast food in the car on the way home
from one job before going to his second job. And Jobs will have the mentality
and the skill set to go into a school, observe, ask hard questions, interview
students and teachers—who knows, maybe even take a look at the books, to make
sure the school is financially solvent. White guys who are CEOs of major
corporations can do that.
But
on this side of the café where I’m writing we have Amir, whose child just
turned six months. On the other side, Elizabeth, whose two children are
fourteen and twelve. Are either Amir or Elizabeth capable of doing what Jobs
did? Good people they are, but are they capable of evaluating a school? Could
they be fooled by fancy brochures or the latest technology, when in fact an
old-fashioned, low-tech teacher—standing in front of her or his
blackboard—would serve them better?
“Hey,”
I just asked Elizabeth, “whatever happened at your daughter’s school? You guys
did a strike, and demanded the resignation of the principal, substitute
teachers, a security guard—even had a meeting with the Department of Education
about the school. Anything ever happen?”
“Not
a thing,” said Elizabeth. “Well, let’s see what happens.”
So
she’s savvy, in one sense—savvy enough to organize, to make a bit of a stink.
But there’s something missing, something that I recall from a book by Malcolm Gladwell.
And that was? That the ruling classes—meaning the people who buy the Starbucks
coffee, not serve it—train their children quite unconsciously, but no less
effectively, how to mediate the world. Is there a simpler way to put it? You
bet—the movers and shakers teach their kids how to get what they want.
For
three months, Elizabeth’s youngest daughter didn’t have an English teacher. I
think now of my mother—would she have let that happen?
In
fact, she didn’t. She had stirred around when needed, at one point joining a
group of parents who forced the city to enclose a storm sewer that had swept
away a child playing in it after a hard rain. The moms came down so hard on the
official that they drove him to tears.
Do
either Elizabeth or Amir have those skills? Do they have the mentality? And
lastly, do they have the clout to back up a threat?
If
they don’t, then they need Jobs’ child to be sitting next to their kids in a
public school. And guess what? Jobs needs his child to be there, too. Because
having a system where the entitled get one education and the downtrodden get
another leads to a world and a system that ultimately doesn’t benefit anyone.
Sure,
for the short-term it works. But pretty soon, you end up with a society so
stratified that it looks like Mexico, which, by the way, is about to unravel.
Could
anyone seriously want that?
