Months ago, someone told me about a Janesville School District plan to charge teenage students from China and east Asia to live and attend classes in Janesville’s schools.
I thought it was a joke. It took quite a bit to convince me that, actually, there was a nascent plan like this.
It’s hard to fathom the level of recklessness in enticing these students, from half the way around the world, to live far from their families, at a paying rate, for the privilege of a Janesville education, when so little has been considered carefully.
The truth is that desperate communities with middling leaders produce bad plans. One sometimes sees places that will throw anything at the wall, hoping something will stick.
It’s worse, though, when the plans involve a project this difficult, this sketchy, and involving minor children.
One may see more about the story online at the Gazette, in a story that – predictably – questions little.
See, ‘Janesville international education plans taking shape’ @ http://gazettextra.com/article/20131201/ARTICLES/131129711/1059.
Next up for that paper: Edsel taking shape as car of the century and Walter Mondale’s presidential campaign against Pres. Reagan shaping up nicely.
That the district would use its ‘chief information officer’ on a tour of east Asia (including ‘seven Cambodian schools in two days’) tells how shallow this effort is: selling paying families on the prospect of an education here without an established curriculum, without a plan for supervision of living conditions for minor children, etc. is astonishing. (Cambodian students, as it turns out, will not be initial prospects for the program.)
About living conditions, one reads that
Smiley [Robert Smiley, Janesville School District’s chief information officer] also met with a Chinese businessman who is remodeling the old Holiday Inn in South Beloit, Ill. Smiley said he had several meetings with Wang Zhibin and his investment group. Wang plans to house Chinese high school and college students in one wing of the hotel.
That’s not an established boarding program – it’s an ill-conceived idea that’s fraught with risks.
By the way, there’s sure to be a defensive, red-herring claim that to criticize the plan is to doubt the ability of Asian students to live in America – nothing could be farther from the truth. One shouldn’t doubt the ability of students from abroad (from Asia, Europe, etc.) – one should have every reason to question this slapdash domestic program to wring tuition from families with the hope of a high-quality American education.
There’s a reason that boarding programs are few and far between, and that the programs America has are often long-established and expensive: it’s very hard to do this safely and with academic success.