The Arizona education system is ridiculous.
Being the son of a teacher in Arizona, a product of the system and a human being with five functioning senses, I know just how bad our educational system can be.
In one of its recent blunders, the Tempe Union High School District screwed hard-working teachers and the rest of the district by deciding to continue funding the Peggy Payne Academy for higher learning.
PPA is a school for gifted students in the Tempe district. The Academy costs the district $300,000 a year to keep it running. That $300,000 helps about 100 students by providing them with "special learning."
That is less than one percent of all the students in the district receiving a significant chunk of the district's budget.
The idea of being gifted is somewhat silly to me. In elementary school, I was placed in a "gifted program." It was called PACE - I think it was named after the picante sauce - and every Friday we would spend the day at another school where we would pretty much do nothing.
I remember learning about animation and doing reports on cars and Jerry Colangelo. While these things may seem special to some people, I don't know what anyone was thinking when they called me special because I could give a speech on the owner of the Phoenix Suns for a whole minute.
While this program wasn't anything like a whole school for gifted kids, the whole experience made me skeptical of gifted programs in general.
My experience with the National Honor Society wasn't any better. I wasn't invited to join NHS because I had a low grade point average. I was feeling kind of down on myself because all of my friends were in NHS.
But then I met someone in NHS who spelled the word engineer with the letter "A." I didn't feel so bad anymore, and realized that there is nothing honorable about programs for gifted students who are unable to spell their future careers.
Another one of the big problems with PPA is that it's not the regular high school experience. That may be what draws some kids to PPA, but it might also be what scares some kids off.
Take a look at Corona del Sol High School in Tempe. Currently, out of the approximately 530 students there who are eligible to attend the gifted academy, only two students are actually going to it.
The 528 remaining kids had the experience of going to Corona and decided that they didn't want to leave. Next year, Corona is going to lose about six incoming freshman to PPA, showing that gifted students aren't leaving a normal high school for the gifted alternative. Personally, I'm elated by that fact.
In life, there are certain things kids need to learn. It is important to be book smart, but you have to be able to interact with people too. Going to a special school just won't teach a person those skills.
When children are home-schooled, they are left ill-equipped for the real world. It's not necessarily true for all home-schoolers, but when you don't grow up in an environment where you interact with people who are different and mean and crazy and sexy and cool, you're not going to be able to socialize as well.
That's not to say that schools like PPA don't serve a purpose. These schools are probably very effective. Heck, if you have a 20:1 student to teacher ratio compared to the 27:1 average at other schools, you'd better be doing something with those kids.
The schools are probably more effective in teaching the text, but they are taking away from the rest of the schools. Currently there are 35 students who aren't in the Tempe Union High School District who are attending the PPA. That means that Tempe's district has to pick up the tab of $3,000 for each of these students.
Meanwhile, the teachers and principals at other schools are losing money for the hard work that they do. The teachers who break their backs working extra-curricular activities are losing bonuses that they earned and the principal is getting scammed too.
The principal for the PPA receives the same pay that any other principal in the district would make. Keep in mind that the PPA principal is only responsible for 100 students, but will make as much money as an equally qualified principal at Corona, who is responsible for approximately 2,800 students.
This school may seem like a good idea if there is money coming out the yang, but in an economic crisis, it's a luxury that our school system can't afford.
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Christopher Fanning is a journalism sophomore. E-mail him at christopher.fanning@asu.edu.
