Taxes, Shmaxes

So I've been reading a lot of material the many factors contributing to a city's personality and its subsequent relationship to education--demography, taxation, who the major power players are, etc., and it's quite interesting. One thing that really stood out was a reading analyzing what many sociologists termed the 'Gray Peril,' or the significant presence of older residents who presumably do not favor spending on schools. In a book called Ten Thousand Democracies, the authors take a look at the Peril and discover that while older Americans tend to generally favor lower educational spending when compared to younger voters, they become more amenable to educational spending as they age. They suggest a few reasons, but the main one is the connection of 'good schools' to property values. The older voters would most likely own homes and would naturally be interested in them maintaining a high value.

Now, it is important to note that this factor is only relevant if a city uses property values to fund education. Such is not the case in Jersey City, which receives the lion's share of its funding from the state, thereby removing the direct impact of educational excellence from residential pockets. Add the fact that approximately 70 percent of the city's population do not own their homes and you begin to see how easy it is for school performance to matter only to those directly impacted (i.e., parents). Another side effect is educational administrators who respond to whomever butters their bread--and in this case, tells them that test scores are all that matter.

So even if there was strong parent participation in the form of individual school councils, attendance at Board meetings, fundraising, etc.,we still have the reality of a system that will not jump now matter how high we tell them to go. For an understanding of how this looks in real time, here's a first rate example: In the early days of Middle School 7's Parent Teacher Council, Superintendent Charles Epps visited a meeting to field parent questions. One query was about an instructional space in another school (P.S. 6) that teachers complained was filled floor to ceiling with boxes, making it unusable for teaching AND a fire hazard. When Epps was asked in front of a room of 200 parents when they would be removed and if they were a fire hazard, he unflinchingly side-stepped the question with "They're gonna be there for a while," even when the question was repeated. It was clear he felt no need to assure us that a blatant fire hazard in a building with 1,000 of our kids would receive his quick attention. That's what happens when there is no accountability.

So how do we flip the script so that school performance is tied more closely to student needs? That, dear friends, is the question of the day and my sign off for now...