"If you send your kid to private school, you are a bad person"

[Supersedeas]

80. This has to be a parody (an RAA argument) by someone what wants to undermine public education

Specifically, this little snip caught my attention:

"Reading Walt Whitman in ninth grade changed the way you see the world? Well, getting drunk before basketball games with kids who lived at the trailer park near my house did the same for me. In fact it’s part of the reason I feel so strongly about public schools."

Yes, we can see why Allison feels and emotes so strongly about public schools. But, the moral of the story and the underlying ethical framework of her piece is that not everyone is going to share the ethos that she so strongly gravitates toward as reflected specifically in that little snippet above--in fact, some might, lord forbid, have reasonable objections to what she so strongly emotes about.

Public charter schools have changed that ethos to a degree. The problem with the typical public school is that parents, students, educators, and administrators do not share the same perspectives, objectives, and ethos regarding the common education of the student body. Parents who have had to tangle with educators and administrators know this--sometime public educators and administrators simply have different priorities. Sometimes, a minimally safe and structured daycare like environment is the one and only priorities--anything Allison's claims that all of us have a moral duty to sacrifice generations and generations of talented people in order to achieve either a mediocre outcome or to achieve some otherwise generational moral objective decades from now when the common ethos is fleshed out in some way. Allison also doesn't seem to be engaged or concerned with this missing and undefined objective.

More to the point, consider this low hanging fruit that Allison dropped:

"I get it: You want an exceptional arts program and computer animation and maybe even Mandarin. You want a cohesive educational philosophy. You want creativity, not teaching to the test. You want great outdoor space and small classrooms and personal attention. You know who else wants those things? Everyone."

Factually, Allison is just dead wrong about that statement. Everyone does not share these items as educational priorities. Mandarin, really? Art programs and creativity are not even on some administrators radars--not every student and not every parent shares these as priorities either--some never ever will. The motivation to enter public school is as varied as the people to attend the school. What private and charter schools sell is a common educational ethos--when the students enters those schools, the student, the parents, the educators all realize that there are certain common expectations and common standards. It is not the luck of the draw regarding school district boundary lines, not the luck of the draw regarding the expectations and standards of this years principal (who may be transferred at years end) or the particular teacher (who may resign mid-year because of sometimes horrendous discipline problems in the classroom--ie. our local middle school has had a rash of sexual assaults and gang violence--we are talking 6th, 7th, and 8th graders--what qualifies as 'Allison's alright' in that environment).

Alternatively, there is a common educational ethos in private and charter schools; and that common ethos is acknowledged by EVERYONE prior to enrollment in a private or charter school. It is not that way in public schools now...unless the generic ethos of mediocrity (whatever that is) is something that Allison is selling--and I am not sure that she is really.

As an ethical argument, it has to be a parody.