SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Methinks the lady doesn’t protest enough

Greetings from West Palm Beach, FL, and here’s an article in The Palm Beach Post about how hundreds of parents, some of them taking the day off work, lined up for hours so their kids could have a chance to audition for a public school of the arts. We’ve blogged about this sort of thing before - there’s a special public school of some kind with limited places and so parents in that area jump through hoops to get their kids into the school - and, amazingly, no one ever seems to complain or wonder why the school board doesn’t open a second campus to handle the overflow. In the Palm Beach story, one parent was quoted as saying she didn’t mind taking the time off work or waiting in line. Really?

Imagine if you owned a very popular restaurant that people had to line up for. Wouldn’t you think about expanding your capacity in some way - maybe putting on an addition or opening a second restaurant or creating franchises? I mean, think of all the extra money you could make!

Of course, there’s no extra money to be made in public enterprises, and no doubt that explains why school boards don’t think in terms of expanding the capacity of popular schools (in fact, in some cases, they regard popular schools as a pain in the neck and are motivated to close them, but that’s another story). But the lack of profit motive doesn’t explain why parents meekly accept the imaginary capacity limitations imposed by the school boards.