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Pittsburgh Promise Tries to Make Up for Broken Prior Promise

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There is much rejoicing in the office of the Pittsburgh Promise program as well in the Mayor’s and Superintendent’s office. Several million more dollars have been squeezed from the corporate community to ensure that UPMC’s pledge of $10 million will be forthcoming.

The Promise program was established to provide college scholarships to graduates of the City’s high schools in an effort to stanch the flood of students abandoning the public school system-a bribe by another name. And why is the bribe necessary? Because the school system has been, and continues to be, an almost utter failure in delivering quality education to the majority of its students. So parents are enticed to stay in the City or move into the City in order for their children to get help with college expenses.

But the supreme irony is that the larger and more morally important promise to provide a good education implicit in the district’s very existence has not simply been broken, it has been shattered. Having failed in its moral obligation, the school district and the City have launched an effort to keep kids in the schools. Their first and primary obligation should be to restore a quality education program that achieves good results. When that happens, parents will not have to be bribed to send their children to Pittsburgh’s schools.

After all, the expenditure of over $20,000 per pupil ought to be enough to get the job done. The fact that it isn’t getting done argues for dramatic changes and reforms in the management and oversight of the schools. Some real competition and choice through a voucher program would do wonders for the public schools. They would either get better or disappear. Instead, the Pittsburgh solution is in place: Ignore the real underlying causes of the problems and just throw more money at the them. Money that could be spent on far better things.

Of course all this depends on a corporate and foundation community that is willing to spend money on politically correct things as opposed to things that might actually work-such as a corporate scholarship program to let students choose a school other than the public school.

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