A Quote by Robert Hass
In California we froze property taxes, school size increased, test scores declined, and there was a massive middle-class white flight to private schools. We're turning into Victorian England at a very rapid rate.
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Second, when comparing private school and public school test scores, it's like apples and oranges. Public schools have to take everyone, but private schools can be selective. It's not accurate or fair to compare the job they do.
The rich have grown richer, but their tax rate has declined. The poor have grown poorer, but their taxes have increased.
I was brought up in a very naval, military, and conservative background. My father and his friends had very typical opinions of the British middle class - lower-middle class actually - after the war. My father broke into the middle class by joining the navy. I was the first member of my family ever to go to private school or even to university. So, the armed forces had been upward mobility for him.
We class schools into four grades: leading school, first-rate school, good school and school.
What are called 'public schools' in many of America's wealthy communities aren't really 'public' at all. In effect, they're private schools, whose tuition is hidden away in the purchase price of upscale homes there, and in the corresponding property taxes.
Then years back, when I moved to California, I happened to see a book about fashions of 19th-century Victorian England, only four pages of which was devoted to the dress of the working class.
Cutting taxes is not bad. But if you cut taxes on the wealthy, which is what they wanted to do, you're not helping people who need better schools and better infrastructure and healthcare. You're basically robbing the middle class and the poor to provide tax cuts to the rich.
We are coming into a new era of flight, an ear in which all past conception of time and distance is changing and changing at a very, very rapid rate.
I've seen schools in Detroit where the windows are broken, where there's no heat, and children are sitting with their coats on in class in the middle of a snowstorm. I've also seen schools in California with Olympic-sized swimming pools and cafeterias like five-star restaurants.
Taxes, well laid and well spent, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, and promote the general welfare. Taxes protect property and the environment; taxes make business possible. Taxes pay for roads and schools and bridges and police and teachers. Taxes pay for doctors and nursing homes and medicine.
I don't regard the fact that there's a disparity in test scores nearly as importantly as I do the need for diversity, because I know from long experience that test scores, though useful, are a very limited measure of things that matter in choosing students.
I went to private school for two years, then Aptos Middle School, and I finished at McAteer. Several of my classmates at those schools are my friends today.
You look at the trajectories; and as our schools have declined, you see the other alternatives increase, private school, home schooling, all of the other alternatives are going up.
The American middle class, it seems to me, is looking to politicians now to satisfy a pretty basic - and urgent - level of need. Yet people in the upper middle class - with their excellent health benefits, schools, salaries, retirement plans, nannies and private afterschool programs - have journeyed so far from that level of need that, it often seems to me, they literally cannot hear what resonates with the middle class. That creates a problematic blind spot for those who write, edit or produce what comes to be known about our politicians and their policies.
Increased physical activity during the school day can help children's attention, classroom behavior, and achievement test scores. Meanwhile, the decline of play is closely linked to ADHD; behavioral problems; and stunted social, cognitive, and creative development.
If you're going to compare a middle-income black kid with a middle- income white kid, and, say, you control for family background, family education, and family income, and if this middle-income black kid doesn't score as well as the white kid on the test, then I say, look, you haven't taken into consideration the cumulative effect of living in a segregated neighborhood and going to a de facto segregated school. You're denying a position at Harvard or some other place to a kid that really could make it. That's why I support affirmative action that's based on both class and race.
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