Private giving and the insolvency of chaos
Last week Google announced it was funding all DonorsChoose requests posted for LAUSD classrooms.
That’s good news, right? Well…. it’s complicated. Obviously, more money for our kids is good.
But why must it come via a third party? Every time a middle man is interjected, money for the thing itself is siphoned into third party hands. It is not an efficient way to fund the needs because it is not direct. There is overhead and a huge bureaucracy associated with DonorsChoice. When you give money to your child’s teacher through this medium, some fraction of your money never makes it to her. This is not efficient.
I would prefer my education-donation dollars be maximized for education, and not diverted elsewhere.
This route is not egalitarian either. When you give money to your child’s teacher, you are not giving money to your neighbor’s child’s teacher, even though both may teach in the same, public school system.
This means your “choice” is essentially a method to bypass the administration of a school. Because who is to say the funding propriety that you choose is optimal for the school itself? Who is to say that your child’s teacher’s needs is greater than another’s need within the school as a whole? This giving of “choice” to the donor, is bypassing the choice that we make as a democracy for a democratic education system to be administered centrally. Centralized administration is most efficient but mostly, it is the correct, fair way to administer a large, complicated system. It requires a ‘big-picture’ view of the whole to understand where funds are most needed for the greatest good.
So instead, giving “choice” to the donor undermines the integrity of a system. By saying that the donor’s “choice” is more important than anyone else’s, this is saying that the community does not matter as a community. The choice to empower a system at the community level has, effectively, been removed by this systematized method of privatizing donation priorities.
And what of the donor? Was it not magnanimous of Google to give one million dollars in one fell swoop? Again, of course. But…. if they have such a Private giving and the insolvency of chaos – redqueeninla: