Is Education a Right or a Privilege?

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Money. MONEY. MONEY!</p>

<p>We don’t have ANY. The only reason the various governments are not broke is because the Federal Government can print money. The Wall Street bankers are trying to take that away by replacing the dollar with the renminbi.</p>

<p>OK, where do you propose to get funding? Take it from programs for disabled students? Cut gifted funding?</p>

<p>Public education is dying. People that can are flocking to home schooling, private and parochial schools , or simply moving to better school districts.</p>

<p>Some students will drop out. Sooner is cheaper and better than later.</p>

<p>Triage. Save those we can. Don’t waste a disproportinate share of resources on problem kids.</p>

<p>Of course we can do nothing but continue as is. The successor society will take care of things
That is where we are today.

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<p>Of course I may be wrong, but it looks like this is the view of someone most familar with middle class suburban public schools, where removing troublemakers might focus more attention on capable students and allow them more time for college prep work so they would have a better shot at the top colleges we are always talking about on this board … Schools where parents actually have the option for homeschooling, private or parochial schools.</p>

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Chicago, by the academic year 2002-2003, 87 percent of public-school enrollment was black or Hispanic; less than 10 percent of children in the schools were white. In Washington, D.C., 94 percent of children were black or Hispanic; less than 5 percent were white. In St. Louis, 82 percent of the student population were black or Hispanic; in Philadelphia and Cleveland, 79 percent; in Los Angeles, 84 percent, in Detroit, 96 percent; in Baltimore, 89 percent. In New York City, nearly three quarters of the students were black or Hispanic.

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<p>Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid
Jonathan Kozol/ Harper’s Magazine v.311, n.1864 1sep2005</p>

<p>Kozol has written extensively about what money does and doesn’t accomplish in various schools. A lot of people have been concerned for a lot of years about how poorly money is spent on public education. They think the problem is the system not the amount of money.</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2005/American-Apartheid-Education1sep05.htm[/url]”>http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2005/American-Apartheid-Education1sep05.htm&lt;/a&gt; for more of this article and some of his thoughts on how this segregation hurts children in these schools.</p>

<p>Some believe when adults label children, as troublemakers not worth any teacher’s time or as stellar students capable of great accomplishments, there is a tendency for children to live up to those labels. Robert Gardner, in the preface to his book Successful Intelligence tells a story from his early childhood illustrating this idea. I wish I could link to it, but I am not very computer educated.</p>