Date: Sun, 10 Aug 1997 14:37:05 -0700 (PDT) From: Annelise Anderson <andrsn@andrsn.stanford.edu> To: Chuck Robey <chuckr@glue.umd.edu> Cc: "Jonathan M. Bresler" <jmb@FreeBSD.ORG>, hoek@hwcn.org, softweyr@xmission.com, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FTC regulating use of registrations Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.970810134508.453A-100000@andrsn.stanford.edu> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.96.970810154843.278D-100000@Journey2.mat.net>
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On Sun, 10 Aug 1997, Chuck Robey wrote: > On Sun, 10 Aug 1997, Annelise Anderson wrote: > > Annelise, tho only thing that scares me about the school voucher thing is > the terrible fact of prejudice. You're in academia somewhat, aren't you? > I don't know if you have the visibility to the politics that editors and > publishers of school texts have to wade thru. It makes it hard to produce > books that actually teach something, because local school boards are very > often more interested in pursuing local prejudices. > > At the state level, this is absolutely endemic. I consider this really > hamful. I like to think of myself as being egalitarian. While no one is > free of prejudice, I try, and school vouchers (it seems to me) allow this > kind of abuse without any limitation. I'm in general aware that publishers make a lot of changes to satisfy school boards or whoever it is that decides what texts may be adopted. But a private school is not limited by the decisions of a state board. I would expect more diversity in texts in both areas like U.S. history and the 3Rs. But predicting how all this would play out is difficult and is the reason why a state is not going to adopt it across the board, but will experiment first. (It would be interesting to know how the texts used by private schools in Wisconsin and Minnesota compare to those used in the public schools; I don't know.) The governor of California considered a proposal to fund school vouchers for children in any school that ranked in the lowest 5 percent on standard tests. That would have created a fairly large experiment. Many of the eligible students would have been in places like "LA". New private schools would (in time) come into being--if the vouchers were generous enough. Some of these new schools might be rackets. Some of them might be created by, e.g., the Catholic church, or through expansion of Catholic schools. I would doubt that the texts selected would express a lot of prejudice. Probably texts selected in a "white enclave" private school might be; but that possibility is open now. And I'm not sure that white parents want to bring up prejudiced children who have to live in an increasingly racially diverse environment. Anyway, aren't you setting up the state regulators, the people who decide what texts are acceptable, as the protectors against prejudice, the very people you now see as expressing their prejudices? :-) In general this is a variant of the state's rights issue--whether you can trust states and localities (and the private, perhaps non-profit, sector) to do the right thing, and live with it if in some places they don't. Certainly we decided in Brown v. Board of Education that we couldn't. The country is a little more ready at this point to think that maybe we can (although some proposals reflect the exact opposite). California has long centralized decisions about acceptable texts. I'm not sure what prejudices are expressed in areas like U.S. history. But years ago they went with "whole language" reading and "whole math", and this centralization has been a disaster out of which they are working slowly. California test scores are low across the board (not just in areas where English is not the native language). There are children who need a calculator to figure out 10% of 470. These decisions on how to teach reading and arithmetic are now viewed as a mistake; it would be better if such decisions were not so centralized. This is sort of heavy stuff, isn't it? Sorry. Annelise
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