Many if not all people emigrate for their children. Safe within their family children are amazingly resilient. They’ll pick up the language in weeks not years. They’ll play with any child who’ll play with them. They’ll accept wherever they are as normal. They seem to possess a secret weapon unavailable to their parents.Parents may be as ambivalent towards the USA as Americans are about them. Parents may keep one eye open towards the old country, following its progress, watching for it on television and in the papers. Their children, however, will not. They live in and for the present, which is now the USA. Where parents need gumption, courage and ambition plus the will to make it, their children will have all that and more besides, with no homesickness, no sense of alienation from things American and no feelings of exile. So great may be this feeling of moving forward that parents too may get left behind, seen as old-worldly, accent-ridden, out of touch. A national spelling contest was once won by a 13-year-old Tamil student!Placing a child in the US educational system will be one of the major implications of moving to the USA with a family. Even if you can afford and want to place your children in the private sector there will be remarkable contrasts both with what you remember from your own days at school and from what is going on in Britain today. You may find surprisingly little difference if you are moving from a stable middle class school to one in an equivalent part of the USA, but if you are moving a child from a small rural British primary to a large suburban American school the culture shock experienced (not least by yourself) may be immense, just over this aspect of the move. Prepare your child, and thus yourself for the move.
The Us Education System
The USA actually has two parallel education systems: one private and one public. In the public sector, which involves about 90 per cent of all pupils and students, control has traditionally been vested in state and local authorities under the general supervision of State Boards of Education, usually appointed by the Governor, though sometimes elected. Each state is divided into school districts, over 16,000 throughout the whole USA, each administered by school boards either elected or appointed locally.
Education is therefore far more locally controlled even than it used to be in Britain. This means that by and large rich areas run well-funded schools, poor districts poorly funded schools. However, a widespread concern for civil rights and the belief in the need for a high minimum level of general education has led to the provision of federal funds for the improvement of educational facilities, though not always in the most needy of areas.
Regional Variations
Education is by far the greatest item of expenditure for state and local governments, averaging about a third of total spending, being generally lowest in those states where average earnings are depressed. Though southern states have, with some reluctance, come to regard the provision of high quality public schooling for all children regardless of race as an urgent social necessity their generally lower
incomes mean that they cannot always afford to improve their educational system.
In rural America, particularly in the West, the level of expenditure is partly dictated by the scattered nature of settlement, making educational costs quite high. Cultural characteristics are also quite important. Minnesota’s liberal German and Scandinavian traditions have included considerable support for the adequate funding of education. In the Dakotas, by contrast, a decrease in general levels of prosperity has been reflected in a serious decline in proportionate support for education.