No worthwhile society forms out of ignorance. If you don’t
teach the children, how will they learn?
As promised, I clicked on “Ken Cuccinelli scandal” in the
Google search, and while the details of impropriety, gift-taking, denial, and
two-faced back stabbing are lurid, I’m not interested in giving them much
thought. (Others have, if you are curious.) Corrupt politicians are cliché these days, and there are
other, more pressing, issues -- K-12 education, for example.
In the interest of full disclosure, you should know that I
come from a long, proud line of public school teachers: my mother, my father,
my mother’s mother, my father’s mother, and my aunt on my mother’s side all
retired from public school systems in three states (Virginia, Maryland, and New
Jersey). I am mindful of what it means to be a public school
teacher – what it pays and what it costs. My mother bore the costs for supplies
to outfit her Special Ed classrooms (K-5, depending on the school or the school
year). It mattered to her that her classroom was cheerful and colorful and
filled with enough stimuli to keep her special needs students focused and
engaged in learning.
The public school system in Virginia does not cover these teacher
expenses, so my mother paid for the supplies herself. My sister and I had fun helping Mom pick out the colorful poster board and construction paper she would use to create
bulletin boards for counting and letters and the calendar. Mom made her
own Play-Doh® because it cost less (and tasted better). My sister and I even gave up toys a year
or two sooner than we might have otherwise. Mom would appeal to our altruistic
sensibilities.
“These kids have no chance of a game (puzzle, slinky,
Dressy Bessie doll…) like this at home,” she would explain as the battered
Scrabble board (etc.) went into her “classroom” pile. “You’ll be helping a child learn.”
As a career Special Ed teacher with 32 years before she
retired, my mom undertook the same challenge every year: in 180 days time, could she teach her students to read, or, with the younger kids, tie
their shoe, use the toilet – all the
things I and my sister took for granted? She believed she could; she tried her best. Mom would bring
home photos of a super difficult ADHD kid with a severe learning disorder
successfully finishing my favorite puzzles, grinning with pride. And I felt proud
to have contributed to the progress – a small moment of hope that this kid
might have a chance in the world, a chance to avoid being institutionalized by
his frustrated and beyond-hope caregivers, marginalized, made homeless or
irrelevant.
More disclosure: I am also a product of the Virginia Public
School System, Grades 1 through 12. I attended a private school in Norfolk for
kindergarten – my mother was the teacher, and my enrollment in her class was
part of her benefits package. Call it on-the-job daycare or privilege; I don’t
care. My mom was a great kindergarten teacher. (Where do you think I developed
a taste for her Play-Doh®?) Anyway, we both moved over to the public school
system the next year, I as a student in Virginia Beach, and she as a Special Ed
teacher in Norfolk.
Mom’s retired now. I’m making good and productive use of my
education with few complaints of my own. The Virginia Public School System has served us
both well. So when Ken Cuccinelli revealed his
plan for K-12 taxpayer funded education in Virginia, I read it with
interest. (One last bit of
disclosure: I am childfree. The tax dollars I pay to support public education
in Virginia are not utilized by anyone in my household, and I am totally cool
with that. As my father once pointed out to me, “who wants to live in a town
full of uneducated morons?”)
The
Virginia Education Association doesn’t like this plan, and I respect their
opinion in these matters. (Frankly, so should the damn politicians.) Cuccinelli’s
plan includes measures to provide taxpayer - funded vouchers that allow parents
to pay tuition at private schools and taxpayer financial support for
religious schools – both tactics that succeed in nothing other than the
funneling of my tax dollars away from the public school system that I rely on
to ensure I don’t live in a town full of uneducated morons.
If you properly fund the public school system, there is no
need to subsidize attendance at a private school. Wealthy parents retain, as
always, the right to spend money on a private school for their kids, but a
fully supported public school system provides the same quality of education –
to all the kids, not just the rich ones. The same argument works against his
plan to allow religious schools (also private) to receive public funds. Churches
are tax exempt and contribute nothing to the tax-supported public school system.
They should not be allowed to access tax dollars unless they are willing to
contribute to the overall tax revenue stream. And the fact that a parent may
choose to send their offspring to a private rather than a public school doesn’t exempt them from paying taxes earmarked for public education in
this Commonwealth. If pressed, I am sure most would admit that they don’t want
to live in a town full of uneducated morons either.
Cooch also wants to give parents the right to flunk school
systems that under- perform (and presumably punish them with less or no
funding), but he fails to recognize the fundamental truth that failing schools
need more public funding, not less. His
plan also ignores the reality that somewhat less than 100% of parents are
actively engaged in their children’s education to begin with and are not
qualified to judge the performance of a teacher or a school.
Public school, especially K-8, those years when children are
deemed too young to be left alone, has become as much a daycare as an institute
of learning. Teachers have become babysitters, yet at the same time the burden
of ensuring that a child learns to read, write, and work sums falls solely on
their shoulders. In too many households, parents either have no time or have no
desire to help their children study at night, especially in lower income school
districts where parents are often working more than one job just to make the
ends meet. It’s
bad enough we pay our teachers only marginally better than we pay our
babysitters, but when we fail to treat teachers as the educated
professionals that they are, do we really wonder why burnout drives the best
educators away?
One of Virginia’s state delegates took the time to grade
Cuccinelli’s education plan, and Cooch flunked. Virginia’s public schools need
more support, not less, to reach the levels of academic achievement that ensure
none of us are living in a town full of uneducated morons. Whether the Attorney
General’s motives are self-serving or financially driven, his education plan serves
only a fraction of Virginia’s school-aged children. We need to teach them all.
(If you are interested, Terry
McAuliffe’s plan for education can be found here. Robert Sarvis’s is here.
Sarvis thinks vouchers are cool too. Nothing in Terry’s plan bugged me, but
that does not mean he’s getting my vote…hopeless choice.)
