Brown’s tax plan faltering

I voted NO on Prop. 30, but not just because money will not solve the public school system’s problems. Rather, my main reason for voting NO is that the public education system — including the teachers’ unions and the government bureaucrats who control the system — refuse to define, in a clear and honest way, the very problems they seek to solve. Our society — over the course of many years — has come to expect our educational institutions to contend with: academics, drug abuse, immigration, poverty, teenage pregnancy, violence, parental indifference, and outright resistance to participation in the classroom on the part of some students. If education bureaucrats admit that the system they run cannot contend with — much less solve — all of these societal ills, then they risk cutting off their own tax revenue feet. So instead they continue to create so-called new programs that they claim are making a significant dent in the “education gap” between the rich and the poor. Inside this county I have met no teacher whom I do not admire for that person’s sense of dedication. But in large, urban school districts throughout this country I’ve met far too many teachers who were less than effective inside the classroom. I don’t blame them for their faults; I own too many faults of my own to make room for becoming any other person’s judge. Still, friends, when you send new teachers into poverty-stricken, oftentimes violent, schools inside discouraged neighborhoods, you cannot expect the “best and brightest” to stick it out for long. If we want solutions — not repetitive band aids that do nothing more than extend the status quo — then we must first all agree on what the not-so-mysterious problems are.