Final Project Reflection

After completing our project on school funding and student achievement, I'm left with a pretty empty feeling. The districts we compared are not even close to the differences in other districts. I keep thinking back to my old school giving laptops to each student, and how about 10-12 miles from my high school, in the same county, is Garfield, which is an Abbott District.

The funding inequities are mind boggling. But realistically, it's not a surprise. That's how our country is. We're capitalist, after all. We don't subscribe to making everything equal. That's Socialist... that's been evil for 60 years. We're bound to find inequality everywhere we look in America.

I'm not even going to try and understand the underlying political issues. Bottom line is, I'm not a very political person. Every administration is imperfect, because every human is imperfect. The concept of education being a "zero-sum" game, which was mentioned in the Fructher book, is kind of a microcosm of our entire society. It seems like for every gain, there is an equal loss somewhere else. So, I don't think politicians are actively trying to ruin education in urban areas. They just choose not to fight those battles. I'm sure part of the reason is the "zero sum" analysis (afraid of taking resources away from the economically elite), but I'm sure there are other underlying issues. It's not as simple as "free up more money for education." Nothing in this system is that simple.

Anyon's proposals of revenue sharing, increased taxes, etc., are great in theory. Who knows how they will work in practice? Heck, when I was studying Economics as an undergraduate at Boston College, a lot of things sounded great in theory, whether it was monetary or fiscal policy changes, environmental policy, or many other things. The fact is, we don't know how any of this will turn out, if ever implemented. But again, that's kind of the way this system works. We're too big a country to perfectly predict how any political action will resonate throughout the country. And factor in the probability of something working over a long period of time... it's downright impossible to know how anything will turn out.

But the sad thing is, we're playing with the lives of children. There have been a lot of changes in school funding, many seeming rather experimental, and that's the way most economic policy works. But when the stakes are the future of America's children, it makes the uncertainty so much more unbearable.