I may very well need to settle permanently in London...

if I want to be able to afford to send my future daughter to my alma mater in California.

My high school was featured in a LA Times article because it is increasing tuition by 6% to over $25,000 a year. When I was a student there, tuition was a staggering $15,000. Fortunately for me, I was on full financial aid. Unfortunately for my children, they probably won't be.

The fact that the tuition at private secondary schools is rising so dramatically troubles me for more than just what it may mean for my offspring. As a former public school teacher and a child of the inner city, I can't help but fear this signals a growing divide between the haves and the have-nots (in Los Angeles, at least).

Don't get me wrong. I'm very proud of my alma mater and eternally grateful for the education I received. Really, I was quite lucky to have been able to attend. If I were trying to enroll today, however, I'm not sure I would receive the same level of financial assistance. With fees topping $25K, surely the financial aid "pot" would need to be distributed among a larger group of applicants. Even middle class families would look for greater assistance. Would low-income families even consider having their children apply for such schools or would the large price tag scare them away? (My family was dissuaded originally and only had me apply after two years of debating how we would finance the educational investment.)

The other issue is what this says about public investment in education. If it costs $25K to get a private school education today, how much less is invested in public school education? Better still, would public schools use the money effectively if they had more to spend? I know what all of the research says (more money doesn't necessarily mean better schools), but let's look at how a school like my alma mater spends its money: higher teacher salaries, state-of-the-art technology/equipment/facilities, small class sizes... all the things we public school teachers want for our students but have to fight tooth and nail to get. Could you imagine if we made that available to every child regardless of the circumstances into which he or she was born?

Yes, I know skeptics will say that the private schools' pupil selection criteria means they have fewer difficult kids to teach. Honestly, even the most "difficult" children could thrive if they had the kind of attention one receives at these elite schools. Maybe if they'd been given that kind of attention in preschool or kindergarten, they might have never been given the "difficult" label. Just a thought.

old age

I suffer from memory loss. I think it's genetic. ...either that or I'm not really the twentysomething I think I am. In any case, I couldn't, for the life of me, remember my damned password for this blog. And when I asked for a new one to be sent to my email, it never arrived. Which makes me think I've forgotten which email account I used to create my blogger account. Sigh...

Anyway, there's loads that I want to write about, but I have only a few moments left on this internet cafe pc. (Still no broadband at home. My flatmate controls the utilities. Double sigh...)

Okay, so now with my ranting done, I "promise" to do a proper blog entry soon--perhaps tomorrow--as I have quite a lot on my mind given the state of the world today...the cartoon protests, the Alabama church fires, the fact that Ruth Kelly (UK's education secretary) was hit in the face with a raw egg...

till then...