Private School Vouchers?

Posted by Frederick Gorilla on Apr 27, 2012 in April/May 2012, Diametrically Opposed | 0 comments

Along with conservative economist and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, who envisioned a system where the government’s plan to finance education was separate from the government’s plan to operate schools, I rise in favor of public assistance to private education—a voucher system.

Accordingly, it’s fitting to point out that in a 2011 report (Grover J.Whitehurst’s “The Education Choice and Competition Index: Background and Results, 2011”) the Brookings Institution—a think tank that generally favors government solutions to social issues—found that “a number of studies indicate that public schools tend to improve when they are exposed to choice and competition.”

In short, vouchers promote school systems; they do not inhibit them—and I’d like to review a number of commonly held myths whose debunking proves this point.

Generally, the top two myths are: Vouchers take money from the public school program and vouchers exclude the disadvantaged and children with disabilities.

As to the first objection, it is generally the case that vouchers actually save school systems money. For example, Frederick County spends approximately $12,500 per student in its school system. But since private schools generally cost less than public schools, vouchers can represent much less expense to the taxpayer per student—often in the range of $6,000-$8,000.

As pointed out in one extensive study in the matter—Susan Aud’s “Education by the Numbers: The Fiscal Effects of School Choice Programs, 1990-2006”—where vouchers are used, the savings to states and local districts can be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Furthermore, as to the second objection, Jay Greene and Greg Foster’s “Vouchers for Special Education Students: an Evaluation of Florida’s McKay Scholarship Program” speaks to the public school system’s large and costly special education services—and finds greater user satisfaction in the private one.

The Brookings Institution’s study, however, highlights the kind of resistance that voucher programs—despite their apparent desirability—typically encounter.

Where vouchers or other school choice options are promoted, it reports, “barriers to choice are typically imposed bureaucratically or legislatively.”

The report continues, “Top-down federal control imposes significant regulatory burdens on schools [and] is inflexible and far removed from the consumers and providers of education services—and has to-date had only relatively small effects on raising student achievement. Local and state control, in contrast, is often undermined by special interests that control school bureaucracies.”

It’s a finding that The Foundation for Education Choice, a pro voucher group founded in 1996 by Friedman and his wife, Rose, would agree with.

“Not a single empirical study has ever found that outcomes at American public schools got worse when exposed to school choice programs,” the group asserts, “and numerous studies have found that they improve over time.”

And although such claims may seem counter-intuitive, the reasons behind them are plausible.

As noted above, vouchers apparently save money and seem to provide better special education services. Vouchers also empower parents to pick educational settings for their children that they believe will better meet their needs.

Finally, it’s arguably true that competition always provides for better service.

Thus when any organization—public or private—develops a monopoly, the outcome is likely never increased, efficient or superior service, but, rather, poor, inflexible and decreased service.

Walt Disney once summed the principle up rather handily, “I have been up against tough competition all my life,” he said. “I wouldn’t know how to get along without it.

Yes or Nyet!

I am against private school vouchers because public funds must be used to ensure every child has the opportunity to attend a great public school. Public funds should not be used to fund private schools that are relatively unaccountable to the public.

Instead, public funds should be used to improve our neighborhood public schools. Quality public schools are magnets that bring diverse communities together and attract businesses to our community. For more than 100 years, Americans across the political spectrum have agreed that public schools are opportunity-levelers. Public schools give all children an opportunity to obtain the academic and social skills they need to be successful. Neighborhood public schools bring children of every ethnic, social and economic background together into a sub-community that might not otherwise interact in such a meaningful way.

A voucher is one more tool in the increasing balkanization of America.

Instead of using public funds to ensure every child has access to a great public school, vouchers use taxes to help finance decisions to opt out of public schools. Vouchers divert money from community schools—where all are welcome—to schools based on a specific religion, philosophical approach or other qualifier. Private schools can exclude students with special needs or deny them access, based on any number of variables. Private schools can also throw out students who do not fit their mold. Public schools cannot. Private schools are a legitimate family choice, but not a choice that should be subsidized by the taxpayer—particularly in a county like Frederick, where there are fine public schools available.

The few communities where vouchers have gained some traction are those where the public schools have failed and some high schools can legitimately be called “drop-out factories.” Even in these school systems, there is no definitive evidence that vouchers improve student performance. In fact, by diverting resources, vouchers actually hurt the students who remain in the public schools.

In Frederick County there is no need to consider private school vouchers. We have a highly functioning, nationally respected public school system that already offers choices to families. In addition to the traditional option of great neighborhood schools, families can send their children to gifted and talented programs in elementary school.

The Frederick County Public School system also offers a charter school based on the Montessori Method of instruction, and our high schools offer a variety of focus areas open to out-of-district students. This includes a visual and performing arts emphasis at Governor Thomas Johnson High School, a teaching academy at Brunswick High School and a highly regarded international baccalaureate program at Urbana High School.

Plus, FCPS offers outstanding programs in trades and business education at its Career and Technical Center. All these options are open to every student, including those with special education needs—and without any consideration of the family’s ability to pay.

We do not need to fund two education systems in Frederick, one public and one private, one accountable to the taxpayer and one not; instead, we need to focus our public funds on improving an already first-class system. 

Escaping the Holocaust

Posted by Frederick Gorilla on Apr 27, 2012 in April/May 2012, Artists Colony | 0 comments

A survivor’s legacy through tapestry

When Esther Nisenthal was 15 years old, she decided that she simply wasn’t going to follow the Nazis’ orders to report to a train station with her family. That was October 15, 1942.

She and her 13-year-old sister, Mania, escaped the concentration camps and survived largely by determination and fortitude. They went to family friends for help, but were protected for only two days. After that, they lived in the woods and traveled to nearby towns looking for work. While in the woods, Esther came up with a plan. They needed to create a new background story. They would no longer be Jewish; they both took Catholic names and would be from Poland. She and her sister also pretended to no longer understand German, only Polish. It was a ruse they thought would deflect at least casual Nazi inquisitiveness.

Their stories are documented in 33 tapestries handcrafted by Esther over the years. A few will be on display at 4:30 p.m on April 22 at the Delaplaine Visual Arts and Education Center in downtown Frederick during an event featuring a 30-minute documentary on Nisenthal’s life.

It was after Esther moved to the United States, married—becoming Esther Nisenthal Krinitz—and started a family that she decided to make a tapestry to show her daughters what her childhood home looked like. Both daughters, Bernice and Helene, loved hearing their mother’s heroic tales as they understood the significance of the Holocaust and World War II through her stories. But they never saw pictures of their mother’s home. There simply weren’t any.

“I was always very captivated by her stories,” daughter Bernice Steinhardt says. “And to see them visualized that way, just added a whole other dimension. It was pretty stunning, the first pictures that she created.”

The Krinitzs raised their daughters in Brooklyn, New York, but Steinhardt now lives in Chevy Chase with her husband—and her sister Helene McQuade lives in Pine Plains, New York, also with her husband.

In 1983, Krinitz and her husband, Max, moved to Frederick to be closer to Steinhardt and her children. When they came to Frederick, they also moved Esther’s clothing and alteration business to North Market Street.

“My parents were very happy living in Frederick,” Steinhardt says. “It was a very warm and welcoming place.”

Both lived out the rest of their days in Frederick. Max died in 1998 and Esther died in 2001.

Though Krinitz took a 10-year break after she made the first tapestries, her daughters think she really found her voice through the art form.

“She always really wanted to write a book, or leave some permanent record,” McQuade says. “She really wanted to memorialize her family for us—for me and my sister. She was frustrated because of her language barrier.”

Krinitz’s first language was German, but she also spoke Polish, and was self-taught in English. But she didn’t know how to write well in her new language.

“She wasn’t able to express herself in writing,” McQuade explains.. “She was frustrated by that. And so when she discovered that she could tell her story through these fabric works of art, they just poured out of her.”

It’s an outpouring that apparently not only benefitted Krinitz’s family, but, arguably, anyone who views them.

While in Frederick, Krinitz spoke with schoolchildren and adult audiences about her experiences. She died before much acclaim came, but at least not before getting a taste of it when she saw her work as part of a small show.

There was also talk of a Disney, feature film about her life, but it didn’t work out. The initial recorded interviews with her by filmmaker Lawrence Kasdan however, provided a basis for the documentary—released in 2011—that the Delaplaine will be showing.

In 2003, Krinitz’s daughters created the nonprofit “Art and Remembrance”— a vehicle to care for and organize the tapestries’ travels. The nonprofit aims to use the power of art and personal narrative to, as the organization’s website has it, “illuminate the ravages of war, intolerance and social injustice on its victims.”

Steinhardt also wrote a book about her mother, and called it Memories of Survival. Translated into Japanese and Korean, Memories of Survival one year became required reading for a class of Japanese students—and many wrote to Steinhardt about their impressions. 

Touched by these gestures and their seeming affirmation of the universality of the book’s story, Steinhardt says, “Having both the story and the visual representation of it is what helps underscore the universality of these scenes [in the tapestries].”

Not only, then, does Krinitz’s universal message of difficulty and survival apparently trans late across languages, it also, it seems, bridges generations.

“It’s accessible to audiences, not only of different cultures, but also of different ages,” Steinhardt says. “Kids get it.”

Heart on his sleeve

Posted by Frederick Gorilla on Apr 27, 2012 in April/May 2012, Extreme People | 0 comments

Honoring A Family With an Armful of Ink

It took two—maybe three—minutes for Alfredo Maggi of Frederick to peel off the long sleeved, preppy-striped dress shirt he had on. 

“To be honest, I show this tattoo to almost everyone I meet,” Maggi says, his right arm held out taut. 

Dedicated to his parents—both deceased—Maggi’s tattoo stretches from shoulder to wrist. Picture by picture, the portable mural narrates a journey that started in the Caribbean and ended on Market Street, downtown. 

“Cuba’s right there,” Maggi says, pointing to a puddle of ink near his elbow.

His father, Alfredo, and mother, Herminia—whose cameo appearance can be found on Maggi’s lower arm—both grew up in Cuba, though the couple actually met in the company of “Lady Liberty” in New York City. Eventually the Maggis migrated to Miami, whose visual shout-out is represented on Maggi’s “sleeve” by a tattooed reference to Miami’s Ocean Drive. 

Then there’s the image of Saint Barbara, floating at the crest of Maggi’s arm. Bigger than Cuba and the Statue of Liberty combined, the tattoo inspires reverence and a little bit of terror, he says.

“Sometimes, growing up, I made fun of it,” Maggi adds, referring to the icon whose duplicate once hung in his home, shaping his childhood belief system. “A couple of times I had to pray to it.”

The Saint Barbara image is the needlework of Thomas Kenney of North Market Street’s Classic Electric Tattoo and Piercing, while the stained glass-like cityscapes elsewhere were created by Shane Acuff of Gus’s Tattoo Studio, also on North Market. Other artwork on Maggi’s limb was created by Gordon Staub of Time Bomb Tattoo—yet again of North Market Street. 

Maggi says he decided to sit for three different, downtown tattoo artists as a way of spreading around the love he has for downtown Frederick.

“What makes Alfredo’s sleeve different is that it has artwork by so many different types of tattooers,” Kenney says. “There’s a real painterly style that…may not be what’s common in tattoos—[perhaps] a mimic of a portrait—and then there’s a more tattoo [-ish] style, which are the parts I did.”

Gazing through this party of styles are two realistic portraits by Staub. The tattoo artist’s skill became clear when Maggi—a fount of family lore—laid out the source photos Staub worked with. The snapshot of his mother was taken in 1972. She’s posing beside her husband, though Maggi chose to use another, older photo of his father.

“My dad and his brother flew to New York on Eastern Airlines in 1956,” he explains, showing a black-and-white image of two young men in suits holding messy piles of snow. “They’re sitting on top of a roof in Brooklyn. They were from Cuba, so they’d never seen snow. 

Memorial tattoos aren’t always this elaborate, nor are the emotions they represent so obvious, Acuff says.

“A lot of times [memorial tattoos will] be someone’s name, maybe a date—something small, like a flower,” Acuff explains. “But there can be no doubt that Alfredo’s is a memorial tattoo.”

Maggi’s sleeve wasn’t his first tattoo project, and, from all indications, it’s unlikely to be his last. Still, it might end up being his boldest. 

“People I know were, like, ‘You got a sleeve this time,’” he says proudly. “No [B.S.], I got a sleeve. It took long enough….And the only way I’m going to lose it is if I lose my arm.”