I fully support school vouchers PROVIDED that if a kid from Englewood can demand to be bussed Jefferson Park to go to school, at the Chicago Public School System's expense, then a kid from Harvey will be able to demand to be bussed to Naperville to go to school at the Naperville Public School System's expense.
Fact is, all these voucher programs are designed to do is saddle urban public school systems with a logistical nightmare, both simply the "paratransit" style busing, and the problem of handling declining funding at already low-ranked schools while handling the deluge of students into hitherto highly ranked schools. Urban school districts like Chicago’s, which are starting to show gains, will be chopped off at the knees by the new requirements while suburban districts like Naperville can continue to operate totally unaffected.
I would even go so far as to suggest that the situation at urban schools isn’t as bad as many like to suggest. Fact is, if you take a school, and you collect together a whole bunch of poor kids with fractured home lives, and combine them with a whole bunch of immigrant kids with barely passable English, and you put them all in that school, then you take another school and populate it with kids from wealthy, two parent, single income English speaking families, the former school could have an all-star cast of teachers and an unlimited budget and it’s not going to perform as well as the latter. You can’t saddle schools with those kinds of handicaps and expect them to turn out kids as educated as from schools that can rely on students and their parents to basically educate themselves.
I love to point out to people attacking the CPS that Magnate schools in the city frequently outperform suburban schools. Whitney Young, I believe, is off-and-on the highest scoring school in the state. This is a school run by the exact same bureaucracy as, say Phillips High (one of the worst scoring schools in the state) with the principle difference being that Whitney Young gets to select who it educates.
How would I fix the school situation? I agree with Duke that drastic action needs to be taken, but the focus must be on leveling the playing field among all public schools and giving parents a choice not through bussing but, rather, through direct control over their schools.
The first thing I’d do would be to eliminate the taxing school district. School taxes would be levied by the state and all schools would be funded out of a single pot, based on how many students the school educates and what special needs (if any) those students have. Individual schools would each have their own districts and a non-partisan state commission would be assembled to draw the borders, ignoring political boundaries. Then each of these districts would be run by an elected board and superintendent, who would field parental concerns and inquiries, control teacher hirings, and regulate the curriculum. Also, the PTA should have a statutory advisory role in the school.
Magnate schools and such should be eliminated, everybody in the neighborhood should go to the same school, but the schools should be required to establish three tract offerings (advanced, normal, and remedial) for every class offered. Students should be allowed to choose the tract that best suits them (so if a student is good in math but poor in English, she could select advanced math and remedial English). This prevents good students from being slowed down by classes designed for students that need more help, but avoids social stratification that Magnate schools and “honors programs” create. This is the way my high school managed educating a student body with diverse abilities and it worked very well.
PS: Sorry about the long post, but this is a complex topic.
