The High Price of Education

IPS has already been abandoned. This is just another nail in it's coffin.

That really seems to be the case, seeing as underperforming and low enrollment IPS schools get their funding cut as it is.

The way the city government is set up undermines IPS budget and performance, too, if you start delving into the details of it. It sucks, but IPS has been set up to fail by Unigov from the beginning.

People living in the IPS school district fall into three groups - rich enough to send their kids to private school; don't have kids; or too poor to move to the 'burbs and send their kids to a better school. Does this situation say something about Unigov's attitude toward the inner-city poor?

I think it is about Unigov's attitude towards the inner-city poor. I've always thought it was significant that the two city services that Unigov left un-combined when they "unified" the city and county governments were the school system and the police department; the two areas where the inner-city poor would have benefitted from a combined government, but the suburban wealthy wouldn't get any bang for their buck like they did from the other combined services. I think IPS and IPD are Indy's "separate but equal" water fountains.

The schools are an embarrassment to this city, which claims to be striving for greater status in the eyes of the rest of the country. It's particularly frustrating for me, living in Meridian Kessler. I love my neighborhood. It has great houses, strollable sidewalks, lovely mature trees -- and is unfortunately in the IPS school district. As Brent pointed out, you now have to be childless, too poor to leave, or too rich to care to live in this beautiful neighborhood. And let's not forget about the massive hike in MK property taxes. I'd eat it happily if it made the school that's two blocks away one that I'd be proud to send my (currently non-existent) children to.

The root cause? Public schools aren't a profit center and they don't have their own political lobbyists.

Privitization of schools creates a profit center and returns for shareholders. If they can create those profits with your tax dollars -- all the better.

Once education is fully privitized, your "education" can be fine tuned to create good little consumers and soldiers.

Too, most private schools at this point have some kind of religious affiliation. Soon, we'll have our own tax-funded Christian madrassas.

Welcome to the military, industrial, educational, prison, religion system complex.

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