I think maybe we should just pay more taxes.
Lately I've been volunteering at Dutch's school quite a bit, on some seasonal activities. And what with the budget-slashing, I've been thinking about the way Dutch's school operates. This is how it, and many other public schools works:
1) The district provides the basics, which are getting increasingly basic.
2) Everything else - Friday Running Club, the Outdoor Learning Garden, the field trips, theorganization and subsidization of after-school Spanish and Chinese classes, the organization and subsidization of after-school sports and other activities, the book fair, the visual-arts teacher who visits for one week in the spring, classroom assistance for teachers, and a billion other things - is organized, funded, and managed by parents, mostly the moms.
After the upcoming cuts, every single enrichment element at this school will be provided by middle-class moms. Our school community doesn't have a lot of very rich families, as far as I can tell, but it does have a decent reservoir of families who make enough money that one parent, almost always the mother, can stay home with the kids at least part time, and many of these caregiver are very capable, so they end up taking up a lot of slack at the school. It's getting to the point where The Moms are doing stuff beyond enrichment, into basic services, like organizing a crew of volunteers to paint and fix up the school bathrooms this weekend.
This is a lovely way to build community, but it's a terrible way to provide an education. You can't prop up a failing educational system on the backs of middle-class mothers. It's not fair to them and it's not fair to communities that don't have a large pool of families who can provide time and energy (or money) to the school.
There's some other weird stuff about it, too. It might be a good idea to have at least SOME of the stuff at school being planned and run by people who aren't middle-class (mostly white) women. (The only man on the entire school staff of 43 people this year is the lead custodian.) It also gives the parents who are providing vital services to the school a feeling like they kind of own the place. There's nothing wrong with parents feeling pride and ownership in the school, but it runs the risk of making other parents who aren't involved with activities at the school (for whatever reason) feel marginalized.
Anyway. I have to stop ranting; it's time to print out a whole bunch of stuff for my volunteer activities...
1) The district provides the basics, which are getting increasingly basic.
2) Everything else - Friday Running Club, the Outdoor Learning Garden, the field trips, theorganization and subsidization of after-school Spanish and Chinese classes, the organization and subsidization of after-school sports and other activities, the book fair, the visual-arts teacher who visits for one week in the spring, classroom assistance for teachers, and a billion other things - is organized, funded, and managed by parents, mostly the moms.
After the upcoming cuts, every single enrichment element at this school will be provided by middle-class moms. Our school community doesn't have a lot of very rich families, as far as I can tell, but it does have a decent reservoir of families who make enough money that one parent, almost always the mother, can stay home with the kids at least part time, and many of these caregiver are very capable, so they end up taking up a lot of slack at the school. It's getting to the point where The Moms are doing stuff beyond enrichment, into basic services, like organizing a crew of volunteers to paint and fix up the school bathrooms this weekend.
This is a lovely way to build community, but it's a terrible way to provide an education. You can't prop up a failing educational system on the backs of middle-class mothers. It's not fair to them and it's not fair to communities that don't have a large pool of families who can provide time and energy (or money) to the school.
There's some other weird stuff about it, too. It might be a good idea to have at least SOME of the stuff at school being planned and run by people who aren't middle-class (mostly white) women. (The only man on the entire school staff of 43 people this year is the lead custodian.) It also gives the parents who are providing vital services to the school a feeling like they kind of own the place. There's nothing wrong with parents feeling pride and ownership in the school, but it runs the risk of making other parents who aren't involved with activities at the school (for whatever reason) feel marginalized.
Anyway. I have to stop ranting; it's time to print out a whole bunch of stuff for my volunteer activities...
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