The Thing About Schools
This month’s cover story focuses on schools, a topic that affects us all in one way or another.
Public education is difficult to write about because it involves two things that are most dear to our hearts: our kids and our wallets. Passions run high because we all agree that our community’s children deserve the best. We just don’t agree on exactly what that is.
One person’s innovative program is another’s example of wasted spending. Some say we should do less with more, while others contend that we can’t do enough with what we have.
It would be easy if we could simply defer to the experts. Alas, there is no consensus on who even has true expertise. Do we side with the educators or politicians? Or maybe we think we know better than both? We are all concerned about where our tax dollars go. Often, that leads to debate over our responsibility to the “greater good” versus obligations to our own families.
The beauty of a free society is that we have the right to band together and embark on the path of our choosing. The downside is that if we choose wrong, nobody will save us from ourselves. The decisions we make today, good or bad, will have lasting consequences.
In this issue, we navigate these minefields carefully with a goal of presenting the issues as evenhandedly as possible, and hopefully we provided a few tidbits of information that may have made you think.
