Having spent time with some California teachers recently, I’m aware that already strapped public schools are about to get clobbered in a state which has a $30-odd billion dollar budget deficit, but in which the governor evidently still wants to build ever larger death rows to hold ever more condemned prisoners. A friend of mine who teaches in a very poor school in a very poor neighborhood in the San Francisco Bay area commented that it was the suburban schools which were about to be hit hard and stripped of their special programs. Her school, she assured me, was “safe.” It already had none.
In any case, Margo Freistadt, a copyeditor for the San Francisco Chronicle, offers a modest (yet brilliant) proposal for improving California’s schools, one that would be easily transferable to any of the many states now in danger of sinking under the weight of exploding deficits, growing “homeland security” budgets, and no federal help. Given what most kids think about school, this proposal would also bring reality into closer proximity with the names we give it. Tom
Raising the Bars
Complete sentences: Turning students into prison inmates
Margo Freistadt
January 19, 2003
The San Francisco ChronicleA simple solution would avert the budget disaster facing California’s schools: We should declare every public school to be a prison. The kids would understand.
Details need to be worked out, but I want every child in California to be given a 13-year prison sentence at age 5, with the possibility of a four-year extension.
That way, the $7,000 the state spends per student each year could immediately be raised to $27,000 — what the state spends on each inmate annually. And our criminally under-funded schools would qualify for the only category in the governor’s proposed budget that’s slated to get more money this year.
Gov. Gray Davis is asking for a 1 percent budget increase for the California Department of Corrections. Meanwhile, our schools are flinching at threats of abusive slashes in state support.
Margo Freistadt is a copy editor at The Chronicle.
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A simple solution would avert the budget disaster facing California’s schools: We should declare every public school to be a prison. The kids would understand.
Details need to be worked out, but I want every child in California to be given a 13-year prison sentence at age 5, with the possibility of a four-year extension.
That way, the $7,000 the state spends per student each year could immediately be raised to $27,000 — what the state spends on each inmate annually. And our criminally under-funded schools would qualify for the only category in the governor’s proposed budget that’s slated to get more money this year.
Gov. Gray Davis is asking for a 1 percent budget increase for the California Department of Corrections. Meanwhile, our schools are flinching at threats of abusive slashes in state support.
Margo Freistadt is a copy editor at The Chronicle.