The Beach Cities are becoming more dependent on parent handouts.
When will the local communities accept that running a school as a public entity has simply become unworkable and unnecessary?
Most students possess technology which surpasses the available information and technology provided in local schools.
The teachers receive a substandard education in teaching credential programs, where most courses spend more time on theory and idealized abstractions rather than preparing teachers-in-training for the grim realities which await them in a public school system fraught with corruption and dysfunction.
The availablity of up-to-the-minute information and innovation is faster than any school board or school administrative team can keep up with. Ipods, Ipads, Iphones still risk making "I" the center of one's learning, yet the availability of trolling through the information highway for more information, for accuracy, for the stability of challenging what one reads and considers true should be enough to dissuade local academics of mass technological stupefication.
Local schools are suffering under a creaky and bereft model, one which rewarded the local power of school unions at the expense of the dissected and disparate power elements in local schools and their central school boards. Parents and their children deserve more freedom when it comes to which schools they enroll in and what subjects they wish to learn.
And therein lies the heart of the inherent dysfunction in our local schools. Learning cannot be a coercive activity. Children by nature want to learn, yet increasingly local schools have turned into massive detainment centers where youth are kept off the streets for six or seven hours a day. The rise in crime, deviance, and internal dysfunction which is endangering youth today and clouding their success for the future stem from a culture of moral relativism and compulsive collectivism, both of which have taken hold in our local schools.
Education is about freedom, not force. Public schools cannot break away from this frightening contradiction. Raising revenue for local schools would be much easier if taxpayers did not feel that their money was not being sunk into failing "dropout factories" which cater to the politically-connected few at the expense of the many students who are still waiting to receive a proper education.