On the subject of public schooling

[elfs]

Between the two girls, Omaha and I have spent over $200 on school supplies in the past four days, and that doesn't include the shoes they needed: Yamaraashi-chan's new PE sneakers, and Kouryou-chan's "indoor shoes" for the school hallways at her Montessori school.

What annoys me more than anything is the "general pool" school supplies Yamaraashi-chan is expected to supply. A ream of copy paper, a ream of lined paper, 36 pencils, 100 4x6 index cards, three packs of Post-It notes (yowch, those are pricey), a bottle of glue, three boxes of tissue paper.

There is something to the attitude that "my kid can't get a good education unless your kid does too," which is part of what inspires parents to make these sacrifices. Yamaraashi-chan will never want for the supplies she needs; much of what I bought today will be used more by the less-fortunate students than her. Still, it annoys me that basic supplies, like copy paper, must now be bought by the parents. What's next? If we don't supply it, the kids will go without toilet paper? A pro-rata assessment of the school's electricity and water use?

Comments

Re: Supplies for school.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

It certainly seems to cover a range of possible reasons, and the paper looks suspicious, the pens a little less so. A ream of paper isn't a huge amount of money per child.

(As it happens, my brother was visiting at the weekend--he works in educational statistics, and he was grumping about the statistical idiocy that's buried under the surface.

The conversation drifted onto the topic of why cows can't outmass the planet, and I think that's where we have the advantage of knowing how to use a slide rule.

(Lurching back on-topic)

Parkinsons Law has that section on committees and the size of budget items they'll spend time on. Stuff such as paper is the sort of thing they think they know about, and so gets argued about. And the really big projects they obviously have to discuss. But nobody seems to realise that a bit of attention to the stuff in the middle would save far more than dropping the $500 item they've been arguing about for the last hour. At least using a slide rule gave us a feeling for relative size of figures: you have to be able to do the mental arithmetic to put the decimal point in the right place.