<p>“Mini, you’ve obviously never taught 5th grade in an inner city school. Is money an issue? Absolutely. But money thrown at schools doesn’t take dysfunctional families and make them whole; doesn’t make mothers marry the fathers of their children; doesn’t get the older brother out of jail; doesn’t prevent mom’s boyfriend from abusing the pre-teens in the household.”</p>
<p>Money thrown at them for 50 years, 3X times the amount of money thrown at higher income children, will do ALL of the above. It will provide funds for children to escape dysfunctional families through boarding, it will set new patterns for family life, it will provide round-the-clock activities for children, and classes for parents, it will provide educational social workers to work with families, and, most importantly, it will do that, dependably, for 50 years. </p>
<p>And how do we know it will work? It’s simple. Look at the school spending on white schools - usually with large numbers of immigrants - 1910 to 1960. 3X as much as that spent on Black children. They often came from terrible conditions. Parents in jails. Alcoholic fathers and mothers. Parents who abused their kids. Etc. The result of the 3X spending became obvious after 50 years, didn’t it.</p>
<p>You’ll note that I said money is a necessary condition, not a sufficient one. Obviously, you need to figure out how to spend it well - just like Andover figured out how to spend it well. But you don’t get the chance to figure out how to spend it well unless you know that it will be dependably there - and over a period of generations.</p>
<p>Harkness Tables - you know what those are, right? It means that classes at Exeter don’t have more than 12 students. And it means a lot more. <a href=“http://www.exeter.edu/admissions/harkness.aspx[/url]”>http://www.exeter.edu/admissions/harkness.aspx</a> Rich folks like that! I can’t blame 'em. They know it works. They just have to convince the rest of us to believe that it really doesn’t may any difference. (But they know better, don’t they?)</p>
<p>I know what I got from my Williams education. Rich man’s school. I saw how rich kids (and some of us poorer ones thrown into the mix) got treated differently. And I am very thankful for that education; very grateful, and will remain so. It opened up horizons, ways of thinking, and, most importantly, ways of “being” that I could never, ever have imagined existed. I expect that happens to many of your kids as well. We know it works. It don’t come cheap.</p>