Comments Laurel has made

Open Enrollment: A tool for reducing sprawl?

   Theoretically, Daniel Akst's position that school choice can help reduce urban sprawl appears sound, but in practice, it may cause more harm than good. In most districts with open enrollment, transportation for students to travel to their school of choice is not available. This lack of transportation essentially deprives poorer, inner-city students of choice, as their parents do not have the flexibility in working hours, the funds (especially now that the cost of transportation has risen so significantly), or the vehicles required to transport their children to the better quality schools in the suburbs. More affluent students will then flee inner-city schools for the suburbs, thereby amplifying segregation problems and likely causing the quality of inner-city schools to decline even further.
   Instead, I strongly believe that by increasing school funding and the equity in its distribution, inner-city schools could hire better, more qualified teachers, improve facilities, and eventually improve performance. Once the performance levels of these schools begin to improve, people will begin to move back to urban areas, and segregation in the schools will decrease. Increasing funding, in contrast to initiating open enrollment policies, will provide a more permanent, sustainable, and fair solution to the existing problem and will eliminate the environmental and logistical problems associated with long commutes to schools in the suburbs. Now, if only we had an administration that valued funding schools more than the ginormous-budget military....On School choice could be an answer to sprawl posted 4 years, 1 month ago 24 Responses