My son will turn five years old this month, and I have a problem. Kindergarten registration is next month, and I live on the wrong side of the road.
I live on the west side of a major road in my town, and everyone on my side of the street goes to a certain elementary school. This school has average (at best) test scores, a crumbling building, a lot of distracting behavioral issues among students and is anything but desirable.
Those who live on the east side of the same road, including most of my son’s friends, go to another school. This one is a much newer building, with better technology, better teachers, better test scores and a year-round school calendar. A desirable school, to say the least.
But because we live in an apartment on the west side of the road, rather than an apartment six feet away on the east side of the road, I do not have the option to send my son to the better school that his friends will go to.
The absurdity goes much further when you realize that the distance I live from this school is actually much less than the distance many of the other families that are actually within the zone live from the school. Their children will attend that school.
I, as a concerned parent, am now forced into a decision: either move so that I can reside in the proper geographic location to send my son to that school, or cross my fingers and hope that he will do well at the sub-par school.
We move March 1.
Someone, anyone, justify this system to me.
Education is quickly becoming the demilitarized zone of American politics. Left, center or right, we all agree our system is broken. All ideologies believe in the need for fundamental reform. And a consensus is quickly forming that — at least on this issue — we all have the best of intentions.
When it comes to our kids and making sure they are brought up with the best possible education, we are starting to realize that we all care about the kids more than our political gamesmanship. Well, most of us, at least.
Liberals have increasingly abandoned their belief that conservative education policy is about trying to use schools as a testing ground for evil, profit-driven educational experimentation and market philosophy. Conservatives are increasingly realizing that the left is just as frustrated with the status quo as they are, and are now willing to take a good, hard look at the system.
Certainly, it is true that right and left still differ on policy and there are indeed political brawls over education, but at the very least we don’t tend to question each other’s motivation any longer, as a general rule.
Young, energetic, articulate education reformers are popping up everywhere. Democrats Adrian Fenty, Michelle Rhee, Arnie Duncan and Corey Booker — to name a few — have all become loud advocates for a new paradigm in education. They have been willing to consider market-based education reforms, have questioned the power of teacher unions, teacher tenure and other former sacred-cow issues.
One of the three major priorities stated in Gov. Paul LePage’s State of the State address was education. LePage has a radical reformer of his own in the Department of Education in Commissioner Steve Bowen.
LePage and Bowen will be pushing big, radical changes in the coming months, and their ideas will find a lot of common ground among well-intentioned members of both parties.
What would I like to see happen? I would like to see money from the state attached to the head of the child, rather than the particular geographic location. There is absolutely no reason that living a foot on the wrong side of the road should be the determining factor for where my son — or anyone else’s child — goes to school.
This would reward high-performing schools, allowing them to grow and expand and serve more students, and it would allow failing schools to wither on the vine.
I would like to see teachers paid more and administrators paid less. I would like to see excellent teachers — such as my wife, Erin — rewarded for their talent, and poor teachers no longer protected by tenure.
But above all, I want to see fundamental change. Try something, try anything. The status quo isn’t working.
Matthew Gagnon, a Hampden native, is a Republican political strategist. He previously worked for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. You can reach him at matthew.o.gagnon@gmail.com and read his blog at www.pinetreepolitics.com.
The reason why this situation exists is because the most K-12 public school funding comes from property taxes. Thus areas with more expensive property, owned by wealthier individuals, bring in more tax revenue to fund their schools.
People with expensive property tend to like that system and see education as a commodity that parents can provide to their children.
Perhaps you should try to have your state change its basis for education funding, so that pooled tax revenues are used to fund the schools. This would equalize funding and reduce the built-in advantage wealthier parents create for their children. In American politics, Republicans have tended to dislike such an approach because it “spreads the wealth around.” And some Democrats resist that as well.
Ms. Fried, you’ve actually reinforced Mr. Gagnon’s arguement….the ultimate social and economic equalizer would be for the government to provide each parent with the financial ability to send their child to the school of their choice.
Yes, education is essential for real opportunity. There are various ways to do that and what makes sense in the Virginia suburbs may not make sense in highly rural areas. All approaches require some redistribution.
My wife has taught in the Maryland suburbs, the Virginia suburbs, and yes, she began her career in the rural/suburban Maine school system. Her first job was in Carmel.
School choice is good for urban, suburban and rural school districts.
But in more rural districts, choice involves some daunting transportation preblems, both in increased costs and time.
So far as I know, there is little correlation between per pupil spending and results. The District of Columbia spends some ungodly amount per annum and has a high dropout rate, for instance. If we were talking about unheated schoolrooms with no books that’d be something else, but we aren’t.
You’re basically describing Maine’s LD 1994 school funding law, repealed in the face of great voter dissatisfaction in 1977. Something like that might work now, but at the time Mainers felt that local taxes meant local control and state taxes meant state control. I suspect they still would.
Maine used to have such a tool…it was called the ‘Uniform Property Tax’ Law. A ‘peoples veteo’ repealed it 20 years ago.
It has virtually nothing to do with funding, in my observation. Washington DC spends more per pupil than any other state in the nation (by a lot, as I recall). All that money is flushed down the toilet because the *system* is flawed. Quality schools that do well on the same budget that terrible schools survive on are not rewarded with that quality.
What I did in moving was the same thing parents should be able to do WITHOUT moving. The system has a built in advantage for people like me who have the money and ability to move to a community for a better school, whereby a poor parent cannot.
Good schools should see a FLOOD of students wanting to get into it, and with it, more money… more money for building expansion… more money for additional extracurriculars… more money for classroom technology… etc… that’s the thing that drives me crazy when this topic is discussed… everyone on the left who opposes school choice focuses on the “overcrowded schools” (as though opening access means universally taking everyone), and ignores what that overcrowding means: namely, more money to cope with that “overcrowding”.
I’ve never heard a Republican complain about redistribution regarding this subject… pooling resources and attaching it to the head of the child to provide a market mechanism for school choice is *exactly* what the Republicans want… I have legitimately never heard the “socialism” angle from any Republican about that.
I’ll bet that quite a few conservatives would consider that “socailism”. I’m waiting for them to post here.
The State is supposed to try to even things out to some extent with partial State funding, but that process in Maine is becoming derailed.
This is a great op-ed piece and I wish the Administration well in breaking a failed status quo.
Growing up, I had over an hour’s bus drive to my basic school system. During that drive, I actually traveled through a service center community that had a much better school system. At the time, I asked my parents if I could transfer to that school as it had much greater opportunities for me. They said it wasn’t possible. How could I have known the level of bureaucracy and inertia?
Maine- and America- have got to change.
I am a geezer now, my children all are adults. But this article is a vote for School Choice. That said school choice bothers me just a bit, if every family chose the “east side of the road school” what would happen is overcrowding and thus reduced value of using that school. There must be an answer for that, don’t you think?
Not at all. First of all, that school on the other side of the tracks has a waiting list, and not everyone who wants into the school will get in. The problem is I don’t even have the opportunity to APPLY to go there and GET ON the list, because of geography.
This overcrowding thing is just nonsense, the schools have a number of slots they can realistically fill, and after that, registration is closed down and people will have to go elsewhere – thus destroying the other disingenuous meme that the other schools will just automatically die.
Think of school choice this way: that school on the other side of the road is filled with mostly affluent, white, middle to upper class families, all of whom have monopolized that school. My side of the road (and I have no idea how or why this separation occured so dramatically in such a short distance) is filled with a lot of Latin-American immigrants, black families, etc… none of whom have an opportunity to access that school.
If the number of slots that school has remains EXACTLY the same, but the minority communities that I live with here on this side are given an opportunity to access that school, then two things will happen: one, that school will get more diverse, and those families will have a chance to better their children’s lives where before they didn’t… and two, a lot of those white, upper crust families won’t get in to that school, and will end up going to the next best school over, which has a much higher minority population.
That would be good for two reasons: those students will likely raise the performance of the school they go to (based entirely on the demographic performance, generally), and it will expose those middle class families to the challenges of schools that are currently populated with minority students. We have a big problem right now in that communities self-segregate, and the white, rich kids get a great education and don’t really even care that no one else does, while the minority kids have absolutely no options but failing schools.
Opening enrollment to competition will cross many of these boundaries, investing everyone in across the board quality education a great deal more.
You’re aware that this could lead to a Tragedy of the Commons, quotas, lotteries, etc. Not everyone can go to the “best school”. They’d soon become one of the worst.
Is there no where in the world where education is done right? That is, with our 21st century ability to measure everything, can’t we find a city, state, nation, society that has the proven best education system?
Do we need to rely on Mr. LePage, who seems to have little understanding of public service let alone public administration, to invent a sytem that will determine so much of our youngsters’ futures?
Check into Finland’s educational system. It should be a model for the rest of the world.
Agreed. But even their champions acknowledge that they have a smaller and much more homgeneous population.
As does Maine.
Perhaps you should have researched before you moved into the apt. on the “wrong side” of the street instead of placing an online whinefest about your personal issues. Definitely a school choice slant here but that will simply destroy many school systems across the state as parents all try to send their kids to what they perceive as good schools which will then get overcrowded and the perceived bad schools collapse financially due to low student numbers.
You want a real equalizer? Pay teachers across the state at the same pay scales, not the hodge podge of different pay scales of each individual district. Good teachers tend to go where the money is folks; the leftovers go or stay in the poorer rural districts. Check out what a teacher in Cape Elizabeth makes versus a teacher at Searsport with equivalent experience – its an eye opener.
He’s five. We moved there before he was born, before we were concerned with schools or even knew how to research where some future child would go. Up until recently, we didn’t really even have the resources to move.
That was, honestly, one of the more insulting things I have seen written about me.
Your complaints are also nonsense. Schools getting flush with more students means they get more student dollars, which means they can afford to expand… hire more teachers, build more buildings to accommodate, etc. And if you expect me to shed a tear over terrible schools being destroyed and the students cannibalized into better schools, don’t expect me to. Those schools shut down, all the state dollars diverted to their failing will go to the remaining, better schools.
As for your pay idea, that is just foolish. You contradict yourself in only one paragraph. You say people go where the money is, then propose to level pay across all areas. Why then, would any teacher of worth be compelled to go into low performing, difficult situations – like say, a school in Washington DC with metal detectors, high dropout rates, and unruly students – if the pay was the same as working in an upper crust suburban school?
Paying teachers for their quality, and what they are able to do, is certainly a better idea, regardless of geographic location.
Some context… Maine spends around
$11,572 per pupil on education. An additional FOUR students coming in to a school would pay for an additional teacher. Four more would pay for brand new textbooks for the school. A hundred more students and you can put a 1.15 million dollar addition on the building.
Yes, yes, I know, that per pupil cost goes into more than just those things by themselves… but the point really is, additional money means additional capacity. So overcrowding or what have you will not be anywhere near the issue that people seem to think it will be. And that’s the point.
“Just move if you don’t like the school” is an insensitive response to any parent trying to have their child educated in the best manner possible. Sheesh.
I saw a lot of that at a previous address in the Midwest. Our town was a farm town becoming a city but the outer fringe was in a different school district even though the address was the same town (with a notable cachet). Realters didn’t always tell those moving in what school district the house was in, and the outer district was at the time inferior. A lot of fraud goes around.
It’s not insensitive to ask that one be prepared and evaluate when buying or renting, especially if kids are present or on the horizon. Matt, you might have been saving money before today, but those decsions have a way of coming back to bite you. And, the reason your new apartment will cost you more is probably in direct relation to the quality of the school district.
Edit: I didn’t read your response before I wrote this and I was not being insulting. I agree, one can’t always take everything into account when buying or renting, but a good realtor (and friends) should have helped you. A primary reason for differentials in housing costs is the quality &/or reputation of the schools.
The system is called life and it’s many options. You ( and your son) are “only six feet away” from the optimal school. Isn’t that like failing the test by just one point? So close yet so far. You sir, are one of the lucky ones able to move and improve life for your son. I hope that over the course of his upbringing the fact of blessings/privilege/hard work is inculcated in his character. After all, your son may be the one to revolutionize education for all.
Trust me, coming up with the several thousand dollars necessary to move like we are was not easy, and we are in for some thin months ahead as a result… I am fully aware that not everyone – including the “me” of only a year or two ago – could really contemplate this. Which is *exactly* why the system is broken. People with less means than me need to be able to choose like I did.
Let’s bury this conservative generated myth that tenure protects bad teachers. Every single school board, made up of members the community voted into office by you and your community has the power to fire an untenured teacher without cause. They don’t renew the contract and they don’t give a reason for not doing so. That’s the law and the teachers union never goes to bat for the fired teacher. Got that? Your school board can fire an untenured teacher, no questions, no documentation, no support from the union.
A tenured teacher may also be fired. There is a legal procedure the school board, the superintendent and the principal must follow. It involves documentation and a chance for remediation. It takes a minimum of a year. If this legal procedure is not followed the firing is illegal and the union will protect a teacher illegally fired. If the procedure is followed, the teacher can be fired immediately or contract renewal denied.
The problem of incompetent teachers originates not with the union but with the school board you elected and the superintendent and principals your school board hired. They either didn’t observe during the pre tenure time and gave tenure to an incompetent teacher or they didn’t follow through the legal procedure for terminating her/him after they attained tenure.
In any case, if you have bad teachers and poor student out comes in your school you can do something about it. Elect more responsible school boards who will hire more responsible superintendents and principals. But his requires your involvement.
Boston offers a lottery system for parents that wish to send their children to a school of choice….here are some recent Globe articles of interest:
http://www.boston.com/news/education/specials/school_chance/articles/
You make some good points but the geographical one has been with us for decades (but how can the other side of the street be only six feet?). Adjecent towns with better schools always attract more people becasue even though the taxes may be higher, property values are higher since the schools and other aspects are better.
Figured six feet was about half the road… it was a guesstimate… not the widest road in the world by any stretch of the imagination.
The ‘education system’ in the usa was NOT designed to educate but to indoctrinate.
Please read Charlotte Iserbyt’s “The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America” to get the story.
Homeschool your child. DO not think they will learn anything valuable at public school.
If you care about education please watch this
Charlotte Iserbyt (she lives in Maine now) who was on the inside–skull and bones wife, worked for the dept. of education
The Miseducation of America
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezTIYd5UFRY
Ms Iserbyt is a complete loon.
You watched the whole video? Or read her book?
Or just speculating because your afraid of the truth?
How much do you have to listen to before you realize the woman is waaaaaaay deep into some very strange conspiracy nuttery that has no relation to reality or education.
What about smart kids who don’t have articulate well educated parents? Who looks out for them?
Geograhpy does factor into where you can send your children to school. Unfortunately for some in the model you would like to see. Some will be relegated to an inferior school, just because the quotas were full. Now this inferior school will have less of a chance to turn itself around due to less funds available. We aren’t talking about private schools here, where they are always in competetion with other private schools. They can turn away those they deem disruptive or undesirable. Which is what your favored public schools will do.
The tax payers in the district with the good school might not be too happy with the sudden influx of children from the wrong side of the tracks. Do they get any say in all this? Do the tax payers in the poorer district get any say in re accepting children who get bounced from the so called good school, after the good school has got the money to support them for that year?
The single most important factor in any childs education is the involvement of their parents. I’m sure that your 5 year old son has a fine head start on the rest of his friends, in that your wife is a teacher and you aren’t exactly illiterate. Your son would probably do well, baring mitigating personal factors, in any school.
Please remember that Mr. Gagnon does not live in Maine. Whatever comments he has about Maine’s educational system are theoretical only. That being, said, there is little evidence – except so-called education reformers repeating the mantra that “U.S. schools are failing students” – to show that to be true. All other factors being equal, U.S. students do relatively well. The problem is – and reformers refuse to admit this – parents, community, poverty and other external factors have a significant impact on an individual student’s ability to learn. Too much of the alleged reform is based on anecdote and not hard data because that data does not exist.
Please remember that Mr. Gagnon lived in Maine for 26 years. Please remember Mr. Gagnon matriculated through – for 100% of his school career, from elementary school through higher education at the University of Maine – Maine schools. Please remember that Mr. Gagnon’s wife is an elementary school teacher who taught in Maine schools prior to moving away from Maine. Please remember that Mr. Gagnon served Maine’s junior Senator, working on Maine issues, in the United States Senate.
Nativist garbage. Can’t be a “true Mainer” or have any concept of what Maine is like the moment you step foot outside the state, can you?
Any true Mainer would know that Mainers are nativist, haha.
Good public education is possible for all children. It’s not rocket science. We know what makes good teachers and good schools. Other countries have them. Our problem is that we have let our responsibilities slide and we have not spent the time, money or effort to do what needs to be done. Conservatives with axes to grind have stepped into the breech and are using our school as political/religious footballs in fights over unions, books, curriculum, funding, science, god and prayer. Until concerned, intelligent and dedicated community members start standing up to these political and religious ignoramuses our educational system will continue to suffer from a lack of intelligent leadership, realistic educational goals, wise management and adequate funding.
Dear Matt:
As an educator for many decades, I hesitantly offer my insights and suggestions.
1. Quality education in America begins at home and NOT at the school. I would suggest we do not expend one penny on accommodations or 504 plans until the parents can verify that their child gets three squares a day and is in bed at a reasonable hour and less than one hour of TV or electronic games per night. Reading with your child is the best thing you can do to make your child a good student, but it just doesn’t happen in most homes.
2. Special education is the death of quality public education as we know. Sorry if this offends some people, but it is a fact. If your child is incapable of getting to class and attending school without a personal aide, we are not educating your child, we are providing state-sponsored child care.
3. Unless your child is engaging in sustained physical activity on a regular basis, don’t expect them to sit through classes at school without becoming a handful for his or her teacher. Again, most kids don’t get nearly enough physical exercise, and we wonder why teachers find most boys to have behavioral issues.
Good luck, Matt. Even if you do everything right, your son will be in the minority, and all the funds, energy, and focus will be on the students of parents who do everything wrong.