Saturday, May 27, 2017

Who Vouches for the Inbetween?

So, here's the age old conundrum in American education, and here's why school vouchers won't work. Look at the graphic below. Graphic #1 shows a school with 56% of the population being Black and 33% White, but the White students test at 75% in mathematics, while Black students at the SAME SCHOOL, in the SAME SUBJECT, test at 17% pass rate.*

The factors are many, I'm sure, but I have to lean toward the explanation that the Black students at this school do not have the same academic resources OUTSIDE of the school as the White students. However, the second graphic shows that only 16% of the students are considered "economically disadvantaged," so what does this mean? I believe that the definition of "economically disadvantaged" must have something to do with this. Yet, check this out: 59% of the students are considered "not economically disadvantaged." That means that 44% of the students are supposed not class disadvantaged, but they are ALSO NOT considered "*not* economically disadvantaged." 

Thus, I have to believe that the students who are not poor enough to receive additional academic support from the school or district (tutoring, counseling, learning disability testing, nutritional aid, etc.) are from families who still cannot afford to pay extra to OUTSIDE professionals for tutoring, counseling, learning disability testing, yet NOT POOR ENOUGH to receive additional support from the school. What happens to these students? This is why school vouchers are bogus. A "good school" is a "good school" because of the additional support wealthy and upper middle class families can afford to provide their children and perhaps generous PTSAs (to provide color paper and bountiful teacher supplies) at that particular school. Vouchers will NOT solve the problem of other academic support issues. Cuts to funding in public schools does nothing to help already struggling students who will not be able to AFFORD TRANSPORTATION to other schools that are "better" yet far from the students' district areas.

*[The graphics above are pulled off greatschools.net and are numbers from a high school in Atlanta City Schools.) Since the data are from a non-academic source (yet they do link to empirical sources), these are not necessarily peer-reviewed numbers, but they are indicative of a lot of scholarly studies elsewhere.

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