After you’ve been having steak for a long time, beans taste fine.
That’s the refrain from an old folk song, hinting that “the best” may on occasion offer up diminishing returns; that mediocre or less-than-perfect is sometimes just right.
Consider the Hartford Business Journal. It offers up the gold standard of opinion journalism with Cohen the Columnist, but also makes available the work of other guys who just sneak in the door and peck something out on a computer. Even the perfection of Cohen may not always work for every reader.
Consumers are a diverse, fickle bunch; that’s why the magic of the free market and the magic of aggressive advertising and marketing lays the whole messy business out there. High-end, low-end, cheap, expensive, decadent, show-offy, bare-bones — whatever the consumer wants, they can find it out there somewhere.
Except, of course, for public education. Public education is a confusing stew of impossible promises and expectations; and limited choices. Consumers are viewed as pests and the unsustainable premise suggests that every school will deliver steak all the time, with no beans allowed.
Real estate prices and test scores suggest that some school districts offer up educational steak and some offer up the beans — but that is not acceptable. Every child can grow up to be President of the United States; no child shall be left behind — and every child will lust for academic perfection. That is the game we pretend to play.
But do we allow our consumer families to wander the Earth, looking for that promised perfection? No, no, we erect zoning and other jurisdictional walls that keep the “other” away from you and me. For those stuck in school systems offering up beans every day on the menu, we cluck and express sympathy and appoint another task force to investigate.
School voucher experiments in some jurisdictions, offering the kids a ticket out-of-town, if that’s what it takes to find a good school, have sprouted in some places, but have been met with fierce opposition almost everywhere. A voucher out-of-town is embarrassing for the local folks serving beans at the local schools. It smacks of competitive pressure from the places that serve steak — or better beans.
The pressure for change is everywhere. The crackdown in June in Wethersfield, where 30 “non-resident” students were purged from the school rolls, goes on in many of Hartford’s ring suburbs. Families with the desire to improve the educational future for their kids, are treated as criminals and told to go back to the hideous schools from which they came.
The Hartford region is a confusing mess of “choice” options, ranging from “magnet” schools that attempt to suck white kids into special programs with minority kids, so the region can revel in its “desegregation;” and charter schools, which promise to work magic as public schools with fewer of the restrictions that supposedly impede the traditional public schools. Of course, these kinds of “choices” are sabotaged by limited supply and goofy random lotteries.
You can’t think about any of it too hard. What if a kid wants a mediocre education, but in a safe environment? What if a family has decided that Junior is never going to be a Shakespeare scholar, but it would be nice if he could be spiffed up sufficiently to get him into community college and teach him how to change oil and fix transmissions?
Except for a smattering of charter/magnet choices, schools don’t advertise that way. Choice doesn’t exist in such a fashion. That would be a marketplace at work.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
