Update: I evidently forgot to include the link of the article I was writing about! I have now included it. Hee hee. Oops.

Some of the school districts around here are called “basic aid” districts, meaning they get so much money from property taxes that they receive only “basic aid” from the state for their schools.

About 5 percent of the state’s 1,048 school districts are “basic-aid,” a designation that provides them with only minimal state funding because their property tax revenue is particularly high according to a complex state formula.

Sometimes it’s because of high residential real-estate values, as is the case with Palo Alto, Hillsborough, Saratoga and Los Gatos. Elsewhere, school districts such as Santa Clara are basic aid because of their large share of commercial or industrial property.

One of Gray Davis’s proposals for closing our budget shortfall was to take the excess funding from these districts and then return money to them. Homey didn’t play that; the plan was scrapped.

So these are well-funded districts, okay? But the state’s budget woes are affecting everyone, even the basic aid districts. So public schools are asking parents to contribute a little to their kids’ education.

With the school year under way, bake sales and box-top drives seem like a quaint vestige of the past. Today, public school parents are being pressed for cash — as much as $600 a child.

For some, the aggressive fundraising is turning what had been a goodwill gesture during boom times into something that feels more like an annual obligation.

The entreaties often frame the issue in simple terms, embroidered with guilt. Their theme: If you don’t contribute, your child’s education will suffer.

In Mountain View, elementary school parents this year have been asked to donate $200 a child. Los Gatos parents were asked for “one dollar a day,” or $365. Parents of Los Altos high school students last year were asked for $350 a student. This year, it’s $500.

I get to look forward to being hit up for contributions not only by the private schools I attended, but by my kids’ public schools? Neat.

“We cannot give $200 right now,” said Robin Kuborssy, whose daughter is a fourth-grader at Landels Elementary in Mountain View. Her husband recently quit his job to pursue a college degree.

“If you don’t give something, they call you on the phone,” said Kuborssy, who worries about how failing to contribute the $200 might affect her daughter at school. “I do feel like I need to do something.”

So she may contribute $50 and volunteer to work at fundraising efforts.

…who worries about how failing to contribute the $200 might affect her daughter at school…

There’s a technical term that means “hitting someone up for money with implied threats.” I’m sure I can come up with it if I think about it long enough…

I definitely had fears about what effect contributing money meant when I was in a private school in San Francisco. Lots of families could (and did) donate a whole bunch of money to the school. Mine contributed my full tuition and considered itself quits (understandably). Does the amount of money affect the school’s appraisal of a student? I don’t know. It’s not like the money’s coming in anonymously; they know who gave what.

Of course, above and beyond that, there are lots of districts filled with families who can’t come up with hundreds of dollars to give to their public school. So their schools will just be slashed even more.

We don’t have equal public education in this country.

What I dislike most about getting the parents to donate money is, of course, that it’s not exactly going to convince Sacramento to change what they’re doing about school funding.

Sydney Schanberg has a good little article in the Village Voice:

The president’s No Child Left Behind law requires every public school system to administer rigorous annual testing of students, starting in the third grade, in such subjects as English and math. If the test scores of any segment of a school’s population耀uch as Latinos struggling with English or disabled students in special-ed classes妖o not meet the proficiency levels set by the law, the entire school is listed as “failing” and students can choose to transfer to a school in the district that is doing well. In other words, averaging the test scores of the entire student body might produce a successful result, but the scores of the struggling segment will still, under the law, brand the school as “failing.” In addition to placing new financial and space demands on successful schools, the law’s requirements will also lay serious new money burdens on the ones with troubles, for such things as additional teacher training and additional classes. If the White House shortchanges the program, who is going to foot the bill?

Foot the bill? There was never any intention of footing the bill. (Funny how those “no more unfunded mandates!” people suddenly become very fond of unfunded mandates once they’re in charge.) The entire mission of “No Child Left Behind” is to eventually label every single school in this nation as “failing”—it’s a backdoor way of forcing vouchers or privatization or whatever the hell they want this time.

There are serious, systemic problems with our current educational system. There are serious, systemic problems with our approaches to fixing that system. No Child Left Behind is stealth euthanasia. And don’t think they didn’t know that when they proposed it. Of course, BushCo had to dress it up in other clothing, because if they actually announced to the American public, “You know what? Fuck your kids, ours are going to private schools anyhow,” I don’t think the proposal would have gotten as far.

Update: This is a good article from the Washington Post about what a sneaky, underhanded disaster No Child Left Behind really is.

It’s hard to tell whether this law is more a product of arrogance or ignorance, but either way it’s shaping up to be a spectacular train wreck of a collision between bureaucracy and reality.

The main thrust of the bill is that it requires all schoolchildren to be “proficient” in reading, math and science by the year 2014. Hard to argue with that, until you learn that proficiency has been arbitrarily defined as the current 40th percentile of the nation.

In other words, in 2014 every child will score better than 40 percent of the nation today, or roughly 19 million children. We will be essentially trying to get every child in the nation to be “above average,” and should probably change our name to something like the United States of Lake Wobegon.