EDUCATION POLITICS - Business is all about receiving a fifty-dollar return on a two-dollar investment. Beyond admiring such payback, our modern capitalist democracy lionizes it.
And so we rank citizens are essentially unassailable in demanding as much of our school board. In public forum at this week’s special budgetary LAUSD board meeting, parent after parent stood up and detailed investments of precisely this intimate nature.
Professional teacher after administrator detailed the magnified glories of such investments, well-seeded. And the presentation by one “recovering skool bored member” about the specifics of one particular such opportunity even managed to arouse our otherwise disdainful superintendent.
But why? A ‘penny-wise, pound-foolish’ strategy is inept long term planning.
If funding for deserving title I students concentrated in not-coincidentally high-performing schools costs “$1-2 million” and staves off a loss to LAUSD of over 50 million dollars, why not demand it be so?
There are plenty of righteous, moral, egalitarian and ideological reasons for demanding vital supplemental funding, but these entitlements can all be dispensed with in favor of the fashionable business-model. “Business is business and business must grow, regardless of crummies in tummies you know”.
Investing 2 million dollars to head off the loss of 50 is good business. Title I students attending schools populated by relatively fewer low-income students deserve the same supplemental funding that they enjoy elsewhere. Their need is not negated by the comparative high-performance of the school they have elected to attend. These schools’ success must be replicated. Punishing them by withdrawing funding is instead absurd, counterproductive, antithetical and … bad business.
Inversely, the shoehorning of ever-more students in front of one singular, demoralized and scapegoated teacher, will only sabotage the whole system of education. It is an abdication of sound long-term fiscal planning to sustain futile class sizing; research shows outcomes improve as class size diminishes continuously.
Parents with the option, simply never consider any school with “large” classes, as the experience of virtually all our local and national leaders exemplifies personally. And for our superintendent to enable lower class size among one type of “public” school (charters) at the expense of another (district schools) is simply duplicitous.
ALL Children Deserve Smaller Classes In Order To Learn Better. Period.
It’s simply good business.
(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 46
Pub: June 7, 2013
