Education: A Citizen Voices Issue Framework

In this view, children are coming out of school unprepared because, for all its rhetoric, the community has not really made educating them a top priority.

And city schoolchildren, proponents of this choice believe, are not stupid. They can tell that the community has lost faith in and broken faith with the schools that they attend. This leaves even the best of students feeling cynical. It leaves the most-challenged of them feeling nearly hopeless.

To proponents of this choice, all stakeholders in education – parents, taxpayers, educators, employers, social institutions and government leaders – share the blame for the way the school-community connection has frayed at both ends.

The solution, in this view, is for schools to become more of a resource to the community, while the community should find ways to provide more resources to the schools.

In this view, city schools do lack the money they need to take on all the varied challenges that teaching urban children presents – and only a more equitable state aid system can provide those dollars.

But citizens who advocate this choice are adamant on one point: Resources does not mean only, or even primarily, tax dollars.

This choice believes, besides money problems, schools are equally starved of community connection – volunteer help, community input, social services and civic spirit.

In this view, every school ought to be an anchor of its community and a clearinghouse for its resources – open on nights and weekends, bustling with community meetings, social services, recreation and (very important in this view) adult learning programs. Tapping into such community energy, in this view, would help schools deal with the special challenges of dealing with so many children whose economic or family supports have collapsed.

It’s a way to deal with the whole child in the real world, without breaking the bank trying to do it.

Proponents of this view don’t think the community is solely to blame for the schools’ lack of support. They note that schools, through insular, arrogant behavior, often block themselves off from such civic help. Taxpayers without children aren’t given reasons to see schools as a resource to them. Even parents of schoolchildren feel shut out. Some changes of heart and of policy are needed at the Parkway central office and in the classroom to repair this damage.

If the school-community connection were made more vibrant, in this view, students would see more clearly the connection between their studies and the world outside, would feel the importance of education ratified by everything surrounding them.

And the schools would seem more worthy of local and state tax support for the legitimate expenses of education that now go undefended.

So, in this view, the city schools are deserving of more support to tackle a necessarily complex mission. But intangible supports such as time and advice count every bit as much as the required tax dollars.

• Encourage businesses, universities and foundations to offer more help to public schools as a duty of corporate and institutional citizenship.

• Turn schools into community centers, combining recreation, social services, community meetings and adult education with the K-12 mission. Find the money to keep them open nights and weekends.

• Aggressively promote volunteering by all types of citizens, senior citizens and business leaders as well as parents.

• Restore respect for teaching as a profession, while encouraging teachers to be more open to community input.

• Create a system of statewide school finance that repairs the inequalities that have led to city school spending to lag far behind that in most suburbs.

• Make sure the curriculum takes note of and honors the diversity of the community that the public schools serve.

• Make the schools catalysts for mobilizing the full range of social services in support of children with problems in school or at home. This means radically improving communication and sharing of information with social agencies.

• Find the resources to provide better early childhood education and adult education to those members of the community who can’t afford it.

• Encourage, if not require, teachers to live in the communities where they teach.

• Schools that are open to the community receive more support from the community.

• School children need more role models and mentors to show them that the community cares about them and has a place waiting for them if they learn.

• The Philadelphia school system can’t ignore the economic and environmental factors that inhibit many of its students from learning; it must address the whole child, and needs even more resources than affluent districts to do it.

• If resources don’t matter, why do suburban districts such as Radnor and Lower Merion spend twice as much per child as Philadelphia? That playing field can’t be leveled without some more aid from the state.

• Early childhood and adult education are vital parts of the public schools’ mission, particularly where many families lack the resources to pay for such education.

• By ending the blame game around schools, teachers can regain the community support they need to do their jobs well.

• Schools should exemplify how diversity is a strength of communities.

• Resources won’t solve what ails schools unless we first sharpen their mission with clear, rigorous standards and accountability for meeting those standards.

• Thanks to thinking like this, public schools have become hopelessly bogged down in tasks they weren’t set up to do (e.g. social work and police work), shouldn’t try to do (e.g. teaching ethnic pride or values) or can’t afford to do with current resources (e.g. early childhood education).

• Appeals to fuzzy notions of social justice won’t attract more support from businesses or state government. What will are pragmatic appeals to enlightened self-interest, backed by confidence that the schools will deliver the goods.

• Volunteers and community input are nice, but education policy is rightly the province of professionals.

• Lower Merion and Radnor spend that much on education because their citizens tax themselves to provide it. The state already pays more than three times the percentage of education costs in Philadelphia that it does in those suburbs.

• The public schools should be in the business of teaching the skills and information needed to thrive in mainstream American society, not kowtowing to ethnic interest groups.

• It’s not the community’s place to decide how to educate children; it’s the parents.