How about only providing transportation to families below 133% of the poverty line? I will not support a bill where we provide transportation to anyone who wants to send their kids to a far away school.
It sounds good in theory, but I challenge you to explain how in the world that would work. Cab drivers? I mean...
How many parents would actually do this? You'll be traveling awfully far from home from Brownsville, Brooklyn or East Los Angeles before getting to a decent public school. Those who can afford it have already been placed in private schools anyway.
They can only choose from the schools within that district under this plan (not that I believe the federal government can or should force a change like this).
Or we could do something similar to the Northeast law and force the regions to adopt it by threatening to take away their healthcare money?
And why would we
want to do that?? If I were a regional Governor or school board member I would be pretty peeved to discover that my community wouldn't get health care funding unless they start paying for children to get transported to a farther failing public school instead of the one down the street from them.
As for the Constitutional aspect- I don't believe this bill requires action by the regions as it is setting a national policy... I believe Sban's second statement would violate that clause moreso.
That isn't my experience with the clause. Besides, K-12 education is quite clearly the domain of the regions and forcing a policy like this to be adopted would be found by a reasonable Court to be in violation of that. Senator Sbane's suggestion would make it constitutional, because at that point they aren't forced to make the change, but it would be a textbook example of using a nuclear bomb to kill a housefly.
However- I agree with Sbane's first statement...we need to ensure that the poorest students are able to benefit most as there is a correlation between poverty and lack of quality education- this as you know creates a vicious cycle of continued poverty
Well yeah...but why? Will this change their school quality? Not really. Will this improve their family life (the biggest problem, I would think)? Not at all. The real problem, of course, is that regions seem to still fund education through property taxes for the most part. I don't even think changing that would be very helpful though. I sympathize with the intent of this policy but have no faith in its ability to actually fulfill that goal.
