Do you understand the principle of inclusion at all?

Do you understand that, in order to get along with each other and learn from each other, we have to know each other first?

I went to private schools, Tom. I got scholarships to private schools. I'm here to tell you that private schools taught me a great deal about academics and absolutely nothing about living in the practical world, no, nor anything at all about anyone I would have to deal with later except for white girls with money and white boys with learning problems and chips on their shoulders. I had to learn all the practical stuff later, on my own.

If you want to create a group of thugs, you segregate people with behavior problems into a concentrated mass where the only example they have is each other. Then, as they grow up, we can just transplant them to prisons where they can manufacture quaint license plates and riot occasionally, in between the times when they're released to ply the trades they learned in thug trade school on the rest of us.

If you want to dilute thuglike behavior, you spread kids with behavior problems out and give them other examples to think about. The only way to convert a kid with problems is to give him a way to invest in the society and become a part of it, because it's no fun to tear down something that belongs to you, even a little bit. That doesn't happen unless there's a real reflection of the society at large in the schools' population. If public schools become the last holding tank for the losers, a kind of minisociety for bitter, depressed and hyperactive kids, it won't prevent them from becoming predators on the outside, and it will certainly prevent the rest from understanding who they are in a controlled environment.

As for decent kids with learning disabilities or physical handicaps, are we going to condemn an education concept because they "might" decide to leave such kids out? Never mind that current laws make it illegal for ANY private business to discriminate against such people, and I have great difficulty believing that voucher or private schools would be the one entity exempt from this.

If they don't leave such kids out, it will cost them a mint. They will pass the costs on to the parents. The parents who could afford it anyway will still be able to afford it. The parents who could just afford private school with a voucher will no longer be able to afford it and will return to the public school.

If these parents find a pro-bono lawyer and sue, the government will come in to compel compliance with the education code under threat of taking away the money. There are private schools in PA that have come right out and said they don't want government money because they don't want to have to comply to code. They don't want to be inspected and they don't want to have to hire special education specialists.

While it is true that private businesses may not discriminate against those in wheelchairs, the blind and the deaf, they don't have to provide therapy or education for them either. Wheelchair ramps, Braille door labels, visual alarms: these are what businesses need to provide, and you will hear them complain about the expense plenty, especially if they must retrofit. They need not have Amslan translators on the staff, whole textbooks in Braille or on tape, tutors for the dislexic, facilities and training for special gym classes, guidance counsellors and psychologists for those with neurological behavioral problems... the list goes on. Education is an active process involving the whole person. You can't compare it to mere access to a business or public building. There is considerable incentive for a private school to avoid including such students if they don't come equipped with parents who can afford to pay for the additional care. If you have difficulty believing that, you haven't exercised your imagination enough.

These are hard-core socialists who loath the Edison school for one reason only: it is a private company that is making a profit, and they hate the private sector down to the marrow of their bones.

You didn't read the article yourself. The problem is that Edison is associated with Superintendent Rojas. The opposition hates Rojas. Compound that with the fact that Edison badly mismanaged its staff at the beginning (no love lost there), and you don't have to bring socialism into it at all. This is personal animus writ large. It's politics on a personal level, played out on a city-wide stage.

The public education bureaucracy in this country is no different from any other government bureaucracy. This isn't about education--it's about power and money.

If you'll remove the word "government", and stipulate that any adjective can be substituted for "public education", I'll agree with you. Bureaucracies exist to perpetuate themselves. This includes management structures in private corporations, the Roman Curia, and the command structure in the Pentagon as well as the social service bureaucracies. They hamper freedom just as much as any other bureaucracies, but that's kind of the point. Bureaucrats like to enforce some kind of order and control. They mustn't be allowed to totally take over, but they act as an important brake, for pure freedom, unchecked, has another name: anarchy.

Regards--
Mary Anne