The End

I can't blog anymore. Editors at the upper levels of Patch.com have decided no blogging for local editors for now.

That means two things: I'd love to have more blogs from YOU, the readers of Hopkinton Patch.

The second thing, I'd like to link you to an opinion article in the Wall Street Journal comparing the way we finance schools to the way we buy groceries. I'm pretty sure you need an online subscription to see the whole thing.

For those of you who read Wednesday's post, there was a link to two writers in the New York Times opinion pages. Their column compared the responsibility we place on teachers to the responsibility we place on soldiers.

Essentially, we hold generals accountable for military operations, and we hold teachers, not those who've designed the battle plan, responsible for education. 

The Journal column, by Donald J. Boudreaux, a professor at George Mason U., compares school funding to buying groceries.

He writes, "Suppose that groceries were supplied in the same way as K-12 education. Residents of each county would pay taxes on their properties. Nearly half of those tax revenues would then be spent by government officials to build and operate supermarkets. Each family would be assigned to a particular supermarket according to its home address. And each family would get its weekly allotment of groceries—"for free"—from its neighborhood public supermarket.

"No family would be permitted to get groceries from a public supermarket outside of its district. Fortunately, though, thanks to a Supreme Court decision, families would be free to shop at private supermarkets that charge directly for the groceries they offer. Private-supermarket families, however, would receive no reductions in their property taxes."

Two interesting ways to approach contemporary education issues in the U.S. Fortunately, Hopkinton has great schools and the issue of underperforming students or teachers hasn't landed at its doorstep yet, at least with the horrible thud it has elsewhere.

That's it from me for now!