They never see somebody else's dollar they don't want to spend.
I'm talking about the Charleston County School Board, of course. In its rush to add more prekindergarten classes for low-income children, some members are planning to drive private preschools out of business. Oh, most of them don't say that, and some of them are so slow at economics that they don't even understand the unintended consequences of their actions. [See Early Learning to Grow in Monday's P&C.]
What the CCSD Board has agreed is that it will "offer full-day, pre-kindergarten classes for all of its low-income students within the next five years." No one can quarrel that children who have attended preschool classes are not better prepared than their peers who haven't. Even CCSD's experiments speak for themselves. However, "Lerah Lee, the district's director of early childhood education," is barking up the wrong tree when she blithely comments that, "School leaders' ultimate vision is to have pre-kindergarten for all students, regardless of income."
Let's get this straight, Ms. Lee: you're planning for a school district that just closed five schools to save money to take on the additional costs of preschool education for every child in the district, even for parents who can pay for preschool? You, or these so-called "school leaders," want to put all of Charleston County's non-public preschools out of business? Did I get that right?
What planet did you just drop down from? Or are you a mouthpiece for Superintendent McGinley?
Monday, November 30, 2009
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5 comments:
Did anyone notice that only Elizabeth Kandrac questioned the wisdom of this? Now that McGinley's bandwagon is moving, board members with any sense at all should be asking where it's headed. McGinley is always throwing new programs out there, like confetti, without any logical connection to a larger game plan.
OK, I confess. I don't see the logic. She closes schools just so she can now start looking for space to put leased modular pre-K classrooms on the overcrowded campuses that remain.
Don't worry about McGinley's public pre-K to put private alternatives out of business. CCSD's total failure is what keeps private school booming here in spite of the ressession. As proof of her incompetence, she's already managed to stigmatize the whole pre-K idea by religating to the "under class" the few seats her administration might choose to create outside of Mt. Pleasant.
McGinley has no concept of how to effectively market public education to the community. She's still reserving the best seats for an exclusive few while playing musical chairs among the vast majority. She leaves the masses to fight over what's left. As long as enrollments at public schools like Memminger continue to not resemble their neighborhoods, private school enrollments will remain high, even if CCSD offers enough kindergarten, pre-school and day-care programs for everyone. She's tainted the entire idea already with way she's presented it.
My only experience of a place with universal pre-K was Atlanta (Georgia offers publicly funded pre-K to everyone - it's not required.) There were plenty of private preschools. True, in Georgia, private schools can contract to provide the pre-K classes, but there were plenty of private preschools that didn't.
Sounds like some politician's compromise there. That's a different economic situation than not allowing private pre-k's to contract, though.
I don't know the history of allowing the private schools to contract - I always assumed it was at least partly because the state didn't want to take on the massive building campaign that would be required to guarantee space for every pre-K student in the state. I don't know how many were privately run - it's not like an existing pre-K could keep its current program and get a handout from the state; the state set the requirements for teacher qualifications, the curriculum, the length of day, etc. The preschool my children attended considered it, but then decided it wouldn't fit in with their operation to have one class that was so different from everything else.
There's no way I would send a 4-year-old to school 6 hours a day unless it was a matter of financial survival, so I wouldn't have considered it. But I knew some parents who had their kids in day care all day anyway, and switched to the pre-K. Some of the big day-care operations did contract to provide the pre-K - it probably helped them keep customers because the pre-K kids and the younger siblings could stay at the same place.
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