florida news

"In a ruling expected to reverberate through legal battles over school choice in many states, the Florida Supreme Court today struck down a voucher program for students attending failing schools, saying the state constitution bars Florida from using taxpayer money to finance a private alternative to the public system."
-nytimes

While I'm still officially undecided on the question of school vouchers, my instinct is to applaud this ruling. The court really ruled on a technicality, saying that the constitution requires the state to provide "uniform" schooling, and that private schools don't meet the standard of uniformity. But I guess most court cases are decided like that, in absence of moral judgment, and I prefer that to the alternatives.

In any case.

I lived through 12 years of Florida public education. My parents used a fake address to enroll me in elementary school in Coral Gables so that I wouldn't have to go to Coconut Grove Elementary, which was (and I think still is) fairly poor and run-down. I applied to a magnet program for middle school, and admission was, I'm pretty sure, completely dependent on the SAT they used to make us take every couple of years in elementary school. I continued the magnet program through all four years of high school and ended up at Coral Reef, a brand spankin' new school where I was in the first graduating class and routinely had classes of 10 people or less (thank you IB). It was a great program in a pretty great school, and I worked hard and got good grades and ranked high and went to Columbia.

But I had a few advantages going into it all. I'm not an idiot--that was helpful. I'm competitive and like to do better than other people--that helps too. My parents, while not rich by any means, valued education and pushed me from a young age to work hard in school, get good grades, and read. They had enough time to check that I did my homework at night in 4th grade, and they could take an afternoon off of work to go to a parent-teacher conference if they had to. I could look to my family in Iran to see how hard they were working, how important school was to them, and feel like I had to keep up. I'm a good test-taker (though that's a discussion for another time), so I got put into the academic excellence program in elementary school and did well on the elementary school SAT, the college SAT, the ACT, and other standardized tests. I had people around me--in my house, in my family, in my community--that provided positive (and negative) reinforcement that education equals success equals money and happiness. Not doing well in school would have been seen as a major failure by the people I cared about, and no one likes to fail.

What if I'd gone to a ghetto school where my teachers didn't give me any attention because they were distracted by the 37 ADD kids in the class who don't know how to shut the fuck up? What if no one in my family had ever gone to college or even graduated high school and the only people I interacted with at home and in the street dealt drugs or mugged old ladies or collected welfare? What if I had dyslexia but no one noticed because my school was understaffed and everyone was overworked and my parents both had two jobs and we didn't have health insurance so I couldn't afford to see a specialist to find out what was wrong with me? Maybe the drive to succeed is innate and I would have been just fine regardless, but I find it hard to believe that environment doesn't play a significant role in making people who they turn out to be.