MUSE WITH ME - So which came first, the fierce brevity of hashtags or the over-simplification that belies patience in our harried modern life?
Our whole foreshortened essence of being, with computers that pull up nearly infinite spouts of data we cannot comprehend, and online blogs that spout unedited random thoughts that drop to fingertips … forces us to a place of acceptance of even the harshest of conclusions with little to no support for them.
It’s ironic in the extreme that in this age of free and voluminous data, we should be as poor as ever in history at analyzing it. And it is ironic in the extreme that in this age of educational practice and outcomes as good as ever they have been, that we should be so free to fling about claims of #FAIL and #CLOSE regarding our precious public school and community institutions.
Without apology for schools that should provide better for their charges, the means to an improved end is not to close that which needs fixing but to … FIX IT. If corporations want to be involved in the education of our children, their future workers, then let them pay adequate taxes to the state so that it can fund these schools properly.
If they wish for more direct accolades in the disposition of their precious funds, then let them pay adequate taxes to the state because they are community members and then, give monies directly out of their profits to schools; their quid pro quo can be direct community acknowledgement.
I have nothing against corporate involvement in the public schools. But they should give their money to the public schools, not fund a system of segregated, stratified, disarticulated, inefficient and repetitive and reductionist, specialized, small and narrow schools.
Small is NOT always better. There was a reason to unify school districts and it has to do with the wealth of offerings that a big system that plays to a vast range of interests, abilities and needs can offer.
Some concepts need more than a single word’s encapsulation. Some concepts are a system.
(Sara Roos is a politically active resident of Mar Vista, a biostatistician, the parent of two teenaged LAUSD students and a CityWatch contributor, who blogs at redqueeninla.wordpress.com )
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 11 Issue 43
Pub: May 28, 2013