Bunker Mulligan "Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry." ~Mark Twain

I have always loved Bill Cosby. He is a real person. He has his feet on solid ground. If I were President, this man, with a doctorate in Education, would be my Secretary of Education. You want education reform and a real No Child Left Behind? Bill Cosby would deliver. It would be a sacred mission for this man, not just a job with perks.

He spoke at a dinner commemorating Brown vs. Board of Education:

“Ladies and gentlemen, the lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal,” he declared. “These people are not parenting. They are buying things for kids — $500 sneakers for what? And won’t spend $200 for ‘Hooked on Phonics.’ . . .

“They’re standing on the corner and they can’t speak English,” he exclaimed. “I can’t even talk the way these people talk: ‘Why you ain’t,’ ‘Where you is’ . . . And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. And then I heard the father talk. . . . Everybody knows it’s important to speak English except these knuckleheads. . . . You can’t be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth!”

The crowd loved it. NAACP President Kweisi Mfume was nearly speechless.

La Shawn has a post with some good comments running.

In an article for Cato institute, Eric Wearne (a PhD candidate at Emory University) writes about the decline of quality education in Atlanta since the Brown decision. One point he makes has always caught my eye:

In 1953, right before the decision in Brown v. Board of Education, Atlanta Public Schools consisted of 600 schools serving 18,664 students. Black and white students were kept apart by the government. Fifty years after Brown, APS consists of 96 much larger schools serving 55,812 students of all races, and more than three quarters of them are still in schools where one race has a 90 percent majority.

I’m not sure about his numbers. In 1953, there would have been 31 students per school. Now there are 581. I would guess a PhD candidate verifies his numbers. What strikes me is this 2000% increase in school size. In my mind, larger schools inherently reduce the quality of education.

My graduating class was about 300 students. I knew most of them. So did the teachers. And administrators. In fact, most students at my school knew one another. It was a far more familial setting than schools today. That level of familiarity helped because everyone knew who needed help, who didn’t care, and who was playing hookey (me, many times).

Instead of a school with 1200 students (which was large at the time) we now have schools with as many as 5000 students. How in the world can any school administration do any more than simply deal with problems in that environment?

Most private schools are relatively small. The one I coached at in Tyler had about 300 students. It was typical. Private schools generally have better academic results.

Okay, I hear your argument about that correlation! The public schools in the area were a broad range, and most were about the same size. Their overall academic achievement wasn’t quite as good, but it was better than the “national standard”. These were schools in smaller towns, and the principal not only knew the students, but knew the parents, too. And the parents knew the teachers. You want accountability? Can’t do better than that.

Schools have consolidated over time for many reasons. A single building is looked upon as cheaper to maintain than several smaller ones. I’m not sure that’s valid. In fact, a quick survey tells me there is more money spent on gas for busses to get students to school. And, any repair necessary (new roof?) has the potential to bust the bank. And administration costs would be no better. Every large school has about the same, if not higher, administrator/student ratio as the old and smaller school. Additionally, fewer individual problems to deal with allows an administrator to also teach, as is done in private schools.

The most important result of having more and smaller schools is the sense of community. Kids have a true neighborhood school. Mom no longer has to carry the kids to extracurricular activities and pick them up later. It is all within a few blocks of home.

We might even return to the time when an entire neighborhood watched out for one another.