From 1994 through 1998, I was a member of the Irvine Unified School District’s Board of Education. In that role, I hope and believe the children and voters of Irvine were fairly well represented. I know I learned a great deal about the strengths and weaknesses of our local and state school system.
Perhaps the most important thing I learned about the weaknesses of our schools is that there are no easy solutions to our schools’ problems. When I read Mr. Draper’s article in the Oct. 16 OCBJ, I was reminded of that infamous quote on simple solutions: “There are always simple solutions to complex problems. Unfortunately, they are usually wrong.”
I certainly do not know the solution, but I am certain that I have a pretty good sense of many of the underlying issues. Those issues revolve around both the economic sacrifice of choosing to become a teacher rather than a businessperson and the massive cultural and demographic changes that have occurred in our society during the past 30 years. Vouchers do not address these fundamental issues.
Vouchers are not going to make more qualified young men and women forsake business careers to become teachers. Vouchers are not going to make the thousands of women who only had the opportunity to choose between nursing and teaching before the 1970s decide not to retire from teaching as they reach retirement age.
Vouchers are not going to keep the small percentage of children and young adults that are perpetrating serious crimes on our school campuses forsake evil for good. Vouchers are certainly not going to retrieve the same zest for learning that existed when America was terrified that a single Sputnik could be seen circling the earth from our backyards. They are not going to cause our society to return to what many still think of as the traditional percentage of two parent homes with stay-at-home moms.
Finally, there is no reason to think that vouchers will reduce the Sacramento bureaucracy; in fact, there are many reasons to think that this bureaucracy and the expense of this bureaucracy will increase as they attempt to influence, impact and monitor voucher schools.
Vouchers may well allow many middle class parents to move their kids into private schools by supplementing the proposed $4,000 voucher with a few thousand dollars of their own hard-earned cash. Unfortunately, vouchers will not produce a new generation of brilliant teachers or cause kids to forsake television for literature.
Vouchers will allow those who already have their children in private schools either a subsidy to their existing school costs or allow those already private schools to spend more money on their students. And vouchers will likely pull more of the best teachers away from the public schools where they are so desperately needed.
If we believe in public schools, schools that attempt to educate all of our society for the general good of the overall society, this voucher idea is a mistake. If we care about improving our schools, we need to start by providing more and more of our young men and women reasons for becoming our teachers and teaching our children. We need to focus on the real problems of education.
Hank Adler
Irvine
