Timothy Kudo
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Given last week’s Supreme Court decision favoring
vouchers, perhaps legislators should consider the following as a
prompt for the new SAT writing section:
“You will have a decade to plan and execute real
educational policy reform with little accountability to average
parents. Before you begin accomplishing anything, bicker and make
allegations, and plan on how you can stonewall real reform. Your
solution should be as nonsensical, as partisan and as useless as
you can make it.”
Last week, educators touted newly announced SAT I changes as
vital to making college more equitable, while conservative
reformers called the voucher decision the most important since
Brown v. Board of Education. But in the midst of political and
media hype, parents and students shouldn’t be fooled into
thinking these superficial reforms will help their children get a
better education.
Changes to the SAT I announced last week will replace analogies
with a writing section and make the math section tougher, but they
fail to fix the racial disparities in scoring that are the SAT
I’s most chronic problem. Rather, UC President Richard
Atkinson ““ who spearheaded these changes by essentially
threatening The College Board with the prospect of this university
dropping the test as it stood ““ seems to hope the so-called
improvements will lead to changes in K-12 schools throughout the
country by forcing them to emphasize writing and harder math.
What Atkinson seems to be missing is the group of tests that
college-bound students already have to take that include these
changes: the SAT II. That test has been required for years for
entrance into most universities, yet many schools continue to
inadequately prepare their students for college.
Though Atkinson and others say SATs indicate how well students
will do in their first year of college, at a UC campus under the
quarter system, diligence has as much to do with performance as
intelligence, let alone mere performance on a test.
The voucher decision, on the other hand, paves the way for
changes in K-12 education that advocates say will strike at the
heart of performance differences on tests like the SAT. If federal
proposals supported by President Bush pass, vouchers will give
parents tax credits toward private schools, drastically changing
the way students are educated.
Democrats fear such measures will spell the end for public
education and adversely affect poorer and middle-income families,
while simply giving a subsidy to more wealthy families who can
already afford costly private education.
But in many ways vouchers merely mirror the success of higher
education funding systems. In this state, for example, taxpayers
support the University of California and California State
University, while also funding scholarships for students who choose
to attend private schools like Stanford or Loyola Marymount.
The argument should not center around the benefits or detriments
of socialized education, the separation of church and state or the
evils of private industry ““ it should be over how best to
educate American children. The best way to do this is to invest in
American education, whether it’s private or public.
Highly funded private schools may better serve students, but
that doesn’t mean public schools can’t do the same with
adequate funding. Once again, higher education shows this: public
schools with sufficient funding, like the University of California,
are able in large part to compete with top-notch private
schools.
The problem with K-12 education, particularly in California, is
that it is grossly underfunded. This state ranks 48th in the union
in funding to K-12 education at $5,603 per student despite nearly
10 years of increased spending.
Conservatives argue that blindly throwing money into education
doesn’t solve the problem. They’re right, but
California schools, at least, already have sufficient
accountability standards and policies in place. What they
don’t have is money.
Unless total funding increases, simply moving money to private
schools will do little to increase the overall quality of
education. Rather, it will only allow parents on the margin to put
their children and money into private schools they couldn’t
otherwise afford. This may help those students, but it will also
hurt the students left behind.
At this point there are two options: either cut funding from
other state programs, or raise taxes. Given the financial situation
of the state, there is little fat to trim that hasn’t already
been cut, so it’s time to look elsewhere.
If President Bush chooses to tout a voucher program that could
lead to the largest federally implemented education reform in
decades, he must also increase federal aid to education.
If the poor could finance education in their districts, we
wouldn’t have these problems. The only place left to look is
the rich. Currently the maximum federal income tax charged to the
richest Americans is roughly 40 percent on incomes over $288,350,
just over half of what it was before Ronald Reagan was
president.
Legislators complain that raising this ceiling would constitute
punitive taxation, but even after a tax of 60 percent, the rich
would still be rich. Leaving millionaires with millions (or at
least hundreds of thousands) isn’t punitive ““ taxing a
single parent of two who makes $20,000 is.
If the poor could pay for better schools, they would, but they
can’t. As long as our tax laws favor the rich, so will our
education system. The answer should be clear to our policy makers,
even if they went to public schools.