Ladeez AND Gennemuns, The Price of (De Facto) Segregation Just Went UP!

From the North Side Sun, covering Northeast Jackson, Madison, and Madison Mississippi:

Operating Costs Cited
Most schools plan tuition increases
By Anthony Warren
Sun Staff Writer
Posted: 03/12/09 - 01:39:14 pm CDT

NORTHSIDERS will have to shell out more cash to keep their kids in private school. To meet the needs of ever-increasing operating costs and a desire to keep teachers’ salaries competitive with their public school counterparts, many private schools are raising their fees and tuition for the 2009-10 school year.

Although no one argues that the tuition hikes are needed, private school officials have been faced with the dual challenges of making sure the increase will meet budgetary needs while keeping prices affordable to families affected by the current recession.

In a letter dated February 2, First Presbyterian Day School Head of School Gary Herring said that, because of the economy, “the school board unanimously passed a plan which provides for no increase in fees or tuition” for next year.

The school’s Web site states that tuition for the 2008-09 school year was $4,400 for one elementary student, $8,800 for two, $13,200 for three, and $17,600 for four. For students entering kindergarten the cost was $3,750.

Also according to First Presbyterian’s Web site, the activity and supply fee for each student is $300.

I eagerly await the time when the current economic collapse makes it impossible for Whites in the south (or anywhere, really) any longer to afford segregation their bigotry...

If the folks who sent their kids to 'private' (i.e., segregated) schools had to send their kids to public schools, the quality of the latter wuold improve overnight.

Of course, in that event, there is now an extensive and socially valorized network espousing and validating home schooling.

The reason public schools don't "work" (although they do, actually, at what they're really designed to do: think wholesale warehousing of excess commodities) is that they are funded to do only the absolute least for poor peoples' kids that well-to-do people can get away/live with. I know this from having sat in at legislative school finance committees in three "poor" states" Louisiana, Oklahoma, and New Mexico.

And of course, the people who persist in sending their kids to private schools are mounting more and larger legislative initiatives to grant tax relief to private schoolers, there FURTHER impoverishing the public school system.

I am a fierce critic if USer "schooling." I draw much of my critique from reading and reflecting upon Freire, Giroux, Kohl, Kohn, Kozol, and others. Structurally and pedagogically its flaws are obvious to even the marginally well-informed observer. Its aims are restrictive and regressive, its structures are panopticly penal, and its outcomes--mainly, the alienation of the "students" from her/his own intellectual means of production)--are predictable.

But I always hesitate to agree with the folks who, seeing the corruption of the intention of public schooling by class interests intent on maintaining their privilege, call for its abolition. This is because I know as surely as the sun will "rise" tomorrow, no other institution capable of the emancipatory mission of the schools (no matter how badly betrayed) will ever be permitted to arise to replace the democratic structures and ideals that that the principle of public education embodies.

Just like there will never be another Glass-Steagal act, or another Fairness Doctrine. Just like the USofA will never NOT torture enemy combatants. The conditions of possibility for the initiation of such programs or laws no longer exist. There's no regaining virginity lost...

If there's a silver lining, it may be that there may soon be available some pretty nice campuses into which the public schools might expand, those belongong to private schools whose former parent group have gone broke protecting their kids from diversity...