Pay Your Children To Go To School

Today is yet another sad day for our public education program, our entitlement mentality in America, and our media.  Tom Brokaw, a new member of the White House fellows board, is pushing the idea that paying children to attend school is brilliant.

If I were to take some of the statistics used in Glenn Beck’s latest book “Common Sense” I would see a very stark picture of our education system.  Glenn states the following:

• • Only 34.6% of kids in Baltimore city’s public school system received a high school diploma in 2004;
  • The Indianapolis public school system handed out diplomas to just 30.5% of students;
  • Detroit’s public school system struggled to have 25% of its students qualify for a high school diploma;
  • 45.2% of New York City public school kids graduated with a high school diploma.

What about our nation’s capital?

On-time high school graduation rates for the D.C. area are not improving according to an Education Week study released Tuesday.

[In actuality the On-Time High School Graduation Rate is Declining]

Fewer than 50 percent of high school students graduated within four years from D.C.’s public schools in 2006, according to the study. That’s down almost 9 percent from 2005, the Washington Post reported. The figures didn’t include public charter schools.

The true rate wasn’t provided for in the biased NBC article however, it still says a lot if liberal media outlets can’t spin the story to a better statistic of over 50%.

What about our education system as a whole when compared with those of other countries?

In a 2003 study conducted by UNICEF that took the averages from five different international education studies, the researchers ranked the United States No. 18 out of 24 nations in terms of the relative effectiveness of its educational system.

So excuse me if I’m just a tad skeptical about the latest idea coming out of Washington, D.C.; the incentive to pay children to go to school.  A couple months ago we were paying young women to avoid pregnancy and now we are planning on paying children to get an education!

A July 1 “NBC Nightly News” segment detailed a new use of tax payer dollars in one of the worst performing, financially struggling school systems in the country – the Washington, D.C. public school system. They are paying school children with taxpayer funds, part of a social experiment to improve school participation at the middle school level.

“Keeping the exuberant sixth graders of Shaw Middle School at Garnet-Patterson in line on a sunny Friday is a challenge for principal Brian Betts,” former “Nightly News” anchor-turned-correspondent Tom Brokaw explained. “But this is not an assembly, it’s payday. It’s called Capital Gains – paying students for good grades, behavior and attendance, part of the massive restructuring of the D.C. schools by a 38-year-old Korean-American woman, who as chancellor, wants to transform what is by many measures the worst-performing public school system in the U.S.”

Brokaw credited Washington, D.C. Public School Chancellor Michelle Rhee for being instrumental in making this program a reality. He explained the Capital Gains program was the invention of a Harvard think tank that came with a $1.35-million price tag for taxpayers.

I am very disappointed that this idea was hatched by Michelle Rhee who, beforehand was doing an excellent job at changing the DC public school system.  She has taken tenure away from teachers, fired others, and has increased salaries among other measures I personally agree with.  However, this idea that America should pay children for an education is despicable and will only cause worse standards among our graduating youth.

My thought on paying children is very similar to the concept of the children’s book “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.”  When you give the mouse a cookie, he continues to stick around asking for more and more.  He got away with the cookie, so why not ask for more goodies and entitlements until the people doling out the cookies and additional perks are broke, tired, and annoyed?  This is the enabling concept.  If children do not learn maybe we should be looking at the teachers, the parents, or the curriculum!  Why should we give incentives for children to just sit in a classroom?  What happens when that incentive is gone and a college that admits them does not continue handing out “cookies?”  My guess: they will be left with the mentality of a drug addict.  Students will now be addicted to money and benefits and will become lazy and complacent if they do not receive their immediate gratification or, in this incident, cash.  They will become spoiled and even more uneducated.

What good does paying a child to attend school do, if the curriculum and the teaching is so incredibly horrid?  Teachers are not even giving an accurate representation of American history let alone capable of making children smarter via remuneration.  What happened to the days when it was fun to go to school?  When teachers were interesting and engaging?  Where free thought and opinion was allowed and not dissuaded?  If we cannot teach our youth and encourage their brains, imagination, dreams, and knowledge to grow – then what good will that really do us in the end?

Meanwhile India, China, Russia, and various other countries are way ahead of us on the learning curve.  Their children are engineers, scientists, doctors, and the like.  America worries too much about feelings and emotions, and pushing their political agendas on students rather than caring about truth, facts, logic, and wisdom.

I was fortunate to have teachers who believed in free thought and not indoctrination.  I was lucky enough to look forward to school, taking electives that fired my synapses, like English Sarcasm 101 (no joke); Graphic Arts, Call of the Wild [an English course where you went camping, dissected poetry/short stories, and studied human nature], etc.  I wasn’t stuck in a government mandated curriculum that didn’t engage my brain or hindered my thoughts to the point where I could only think inside a small box.  Unfortunately, that same public school that I attended has changed for the worse (and that was since 1999).

As they say when students receive poor grades as a whole – it’s more a sign of the teacher than those being taught.  I could say the same regarding graduation and attendance rates – it’s more a sign of the government agenda than those being taught.

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