Priorities

With dropout rates in the top 10 urban school districts above 50% (Detroit’s almost 75%), with school budgets being slashed and burned as tax revenues evaporate, class size growing as public education budgets face the same downward pressures that this economy has pushed onto almost every governmental sector, as teachers get laid off, public universities turning away students for lack of funding, it seems as if we are abandoning our future to a mismanaged present. Yet somehow, the fact that education isn’t really an American priority – or we’d get the job done – gets illustrated by… well some pretty amazing decisions on where some local communities are willing to spend truly outrageous sums.

Like Allen High School in a Dallas, Texas suburb. It’s a big school, one of Texas’ largest – 5,000 students – in an obviously affluent community. And they are darned proud of their football team, the Eagles, who placed first in the Texas 5A rankings, and came in second in the 2008 RivalsHigh Top 100 football high schools of America list (the last time they ranked teams); the site notes that: “The RivalsHigh 100 is compiled with the help of the Rivals.com network of high school site publishers, recruiting analysts and AMP team.” They even have a stadium, built three decades ago, that seats 8,000 (a few thousand can stand as well), but given they are such a hot-ticket team, that old arena no longer fits their needs… or generates the ticket revenues that a larger venue might attract. And this is a team that filled a 50,000 seat Texas stadium last year!

So they’ve approved and are about to break ground on a new stadium that will provide all of the following (according to the April 15^th, thepigskindoctors.com):

§ Video Scoreboard

§ Two level press box with film deck and Observation deck

§ Home side reserved seating with seat backs

§ 15,000 additional parking spaces with 4,500 total parking spaces

§ 18,000 seat Stadium with upper deck seating including:

5,000 reserved seating,

2,700 General Admission

4,000 Students

5,300 Visitor

1,000 Band

Wow! That’s about the size of an NHL or NBA arena! Ka’ching! Wonder what such a wondrous stadium might cost? I mean, building a whole school could go for, I don’t know, about $18.5 million according to reedconstructiondata.com, and the average cost in Dallas is about $15.4 million. Even doubling those numbers to accommodate such a huge student population would run $30-$37 million, even making it luscious would push that sum to maybe… er… $50 million. Hmm…. And we are living in economically impaired times, so we really have to design and build close to the bone. So… OMG! $60,000 for the stadium alone!!!! Part of a $120 million dollar bond issue, with the rest going into a performing arts facility. Does anybody read the news?! We’re in a recession! Our kids are losing teachers and classrooms! Hmmmm!

In most of the Western world, education is provided by the central government, ensuring that a roughly equivalent public education is provided to every student. We don’t exactly do it that way. Wikipedia:

In the 2002 Census of Governments, the United States Census Bureau enumerated the following numbers of school systems in the United States:

· 13,506 school district governments

· 178 state-dependent school systems

· 1,330 local-dependent school systems

· 1,196 education service agencies (agencies providing support services to public school systems)

And maintaining local control over public education is one of those sacred cows that no politician in his or her right mind would ever challenge. ABC News (in January 2006, before the bottom fell out of the education budgets) reports that standardized testing administered at age 15 to students in the 40 moist-developed countries in the world place the American educational system at 25^th (and falling as Asian school systems accelerate academic programs). But our football teams can beat the crap out all those European footballers… oh, they don’t play American football. Priorities.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it’s wrong, just plain wrong!