No longer pretending it's equal

When the Supreme Court heard that package of cases known collectively as "Brown v. Board of Education" all those years ago, the issue boiled down the the decision as to whether "separate but equal" was an oxymoron. The Court, quite rightly, decided that a school system could not be "equal" if it was racially divided.

So why do we keep testing those waters? Try this on for size: the American culture does not want equal education for each child.

Is that a difficult fit? So why is it that we continue to defend a "local control" system where the school districts with greater tax revenues have better facilities and more expensive teachers? Granted, the latter is no indicator of greater quality, but that's one of those Great Myths of Human Resources, so we'll let it stand for now.

Why is it that any attempt to put children from a more affluent school into a less affluent school, (or, even more difficult, poor kids into a rich kid school) is met with cries of outrage, frequent violence within the school buildings, and lots of lovely litigation fees?

For that matter, why is it that the very heart of education -- the curriculum -- changes from one district to the next? Why is the United States one of the few nations in the world without an agreed-to national curriculum?

When you present most parents with the hypothetical of "the only way to get the best possible education for your children is a system where someone else's child gets a relatively inferior education" there is usually a pause, followed by some "well, in today's competitive world......" waffle, followed by 80% acceptance. If you just ask: "Is your child entitled to the best education possible?" You get a resounding affirmative. When presented with follow-on involving the reality that their child's "best quality" presupposes somebody else's child having a "worse" or "worst", we go back to the waffle, as well as back to the 80% eventual acceptance/agreement.

So should the more affluent (or at least the affluent who live in neighborhoods of their own kind) be entitled to an education experience superior to those prople who live in less affluent neighborhoods? If so, how is it equal?

For that matter, if the 8% of the school budget provided by the Federal government is unevenly distributed, with more money going to more affluent school districts (where students do better on whichever of the non-standard, state-developed tests), does that not reflect a national will for unequal schools?