I feel that any organization that can provide an open, balanced, safe learning environment should be permitted to provide public schooling. “It is not clear that public schooling needs to impose restrictions on who may provide services.” We run across that problem of defining an open, balanced, safe environment though. With lack of restrictions, any provider should be able to refer to their school as public.
People have raised great concern among religious providers. I think they feel this way because religion has been completely stripped from our traditional public schools. I found it interesting when Hess said, “The nation’s early efforts to provide public education relied heavily upon local church officials to manage public funds.” We once we’re a nation that was built up from the faith of the church. Now, we are the complete opposite. Religion and public schools are two very separate issues. I think we have taken away what our public schools were once all about. Overtime, we stopped caring about faith and morals. It solely started becoming more about the government and money. Fredrick Hess goes on to talk about; “In recent decades, the U.S. Supreme Court has made clear that the push for a “wall of separation” had overreached and run afoul of First Amendment language protecting the “free exercise” of religion.” It almost is like we have reverted back to slavery times. At one time, we segregated against blacks. We had all white schools and all black schools. Now, we do that with religion. If you want any kind of religion you have to attend a religious school because traditional schools were stripped of it.
I agreed with the statement; “we have never imagined that providing opportunity to all students meant treating all students identically.” The only dilemma is there is no one school that is successful at this. We have such a wide variety of students these days; gifted, special needs, children with religious backgrounds, etc. This is where we have start building special schools for special needs. I think it is important we revisit what public education was about before we started bringing politics into it. Somewhere down the line, we forgot about what education was all about. It is about making sure our students are provided an open, balanced, safe learning environment. We started focusing more on the politics of it all and stopped focusing on what is most important for our children.

Is there any between teachers' unions and the recent teacher misconduct legislation?
....(and other questions....)
Sunday, March 29, 2009
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Actually, what Hess is saying here is that the pendulum is perhaps starting to swing back--that the Supreme Court is indicating that the interpretation mandating the removal of religion is being reconsidered...
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