newjerseynewsroom.com

Friday
May 25th

Typical Conservative Viewpoint.

In your article you mention that if upper income towns want to spend more on municipal spending, then let them do so. Yea that's great but you fail to address a huge repercussion of such a practice, it further widens the gap of quality education between the haves and have nots. If our children are to compete in this global society for job success and establishment, they need the best that is offered to them. Money makes a world of difference in education. Field trips, highly qualified teachers, resources, technology, cutting edge equipment and safe and nurturing environments are what scholarly research shows to be consistently effective in providing excellent education. Those children that come from nothing have to compete with the rich kid who gets more just by virtue of being rich. Then add to that the possibility of the richer towns overriding the tax cap and providing a much better school system and voila!, status quo of the rich staying rich and the poor staying poor on repeat. The Civil Rights Act states that all children have the right to an adequate education. Remember Brown vs, Board?? yea well our schools are less integrated now than they were following the ruling of the famous anti segregation case.Gov Christie is a proponent for vouchers that will allow families that aren't even poor to take their kids to schools that are either parochial schools(separation of church and state not happening here) or a school of their choice. This usually means White families take their kids and put them in less "diverse" schools. I love how politicians express faux expertise on educational issues. Just cause I can read a contract doesn't make me a lawyer, or just cause I can bandage a wound shouldn't make me a doctor, YET politicians and lawmakers seem to think they know exactly how schools should be run and how teachers should do their jobs. Such an insult. At one point Chris Christie is even quoted as saying something along the lines of quality education begins and ends in the classroom. That's a lie and not a single education researcher would support that, unless of course you work in the Christie administration. A child's attitude & disposition to education is strongly influenced by what's happening in the home and how involved parents are. Studies even suggest, how many books found in a child's home greatly effects literacy in the early years. Furthermore,). Hart and Risley's (1995) study of 42 families indicated that children living in families receiving welfare heard approximately 10 million words by age three, whereas children in families in which parents were classified as professional heard approximately 30 million words in the same period. These are just a few of the ways teachers in inner cities are already challenged with students who have less & perform worse than their more affluent counter parts. These children need more than the kids that come from more stable homes and safe neighborhoods and while the schools can't undo disenfranchisement that's ravaged communities of color numerous for decades, they can do their best by offering these kids what ALL kids deserve, the best in education, because the reality is, education is their only way out of what seems to be the all too familiar vicious cycle of poverty. If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.

 

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