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School run: Cutting car use will take much more than educating children and parents:
As the summer holidays come to an end and children return to school following lockdown, there couldn't be a better time for us to consider the school commute. Nowadays, many children in the UK commute to school by car. But getting more parents to ditch the car for school journeys and switch to more active modes of travel, such as walking or cycling, is of great public health importance.
[...] As cities have expanded under suburban sprawl, commuting distances to school have increased. They are longer now than they have ever been before. This is another reason more children travel to school by car now than they used to. Less than half of all children in England attend their most local school.
An education policy that lets parents choose their child's school compounds the issue of suburban sprawl. Those parents that are able to exercise choice do so, and in some cases travel great distances so that their child attends the best-performing school. Once school choice has been decided, so too has children's mode of travel to school. Longer school commutes equals more car travel.
[...] Tackling the real causes of car dependency on the school commute would benefit children, society and the environment. It would solve several public health challenges.
If all children attended their local school, fewer children would travel by car, and because of this, fewer children would be injured on the roads. There would be less noise pollution and less air pollution, which would reduce children's risk of developing respiratory conditions. We would see more people speaking to each other on our streets because of the increase in footfall, and there would be an improved sense of safety because there would be more "eyes on the street."
Will eliminating school choice for children make them healthier?
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Friday August 28 2020, @02:02AM (3 children)
Reducing school choice and the correlated competition between schools is not a good way forward. Here in the US we don't have school choice, and if you are zoned for a bad public school you are trapped. Your only options are expensive private school tuition, moving, or homeschooling. The most painful example of this is Chicago where 39% of public school teachers pay to send their kids to private school. source [chicagotribune.com]
Basing this argument on air pollution and traffic deaths is laughably disingenuous. It's very little comfort to think my daughter will have less chance of developing asthma in exchange for sending her to a school that can't afford toilet paper and soap for the bathrooms.*
* This is an honest-to-god example from Glencliff High School, Nashville Tennessee, in the early 90s. Basic essentials like toilet paper, soap, and copy paper ran out by mid-year and the kids had to walk around trash cans that caught water from ceiling leaks whenever it rained. My spouse was zoned for, trapped in, and graduated from that school.
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Friday August 28 2020, @07:09PM
While we (technically) didn't have school choice when I was a kid, my hometown in California definitely does; the regular neighborhood public schools were all converted to charter over-specialized magnet campuses that parents can choose from. So one of my nieces is going to a grammar school focused on the arts, the one I attended as a girl is now a Spanish-immersion academy, another down the road from me is now focused on STEM, and so on.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Saturday August 29 2020, @10:34PM (1 child)
Maybe the focus should be on making sure all public schools have the funding and staffing needed to give each child a chance at a better education. Funneling students to "good" schools is the poor choice forward. That will only lead, in the long run, to fewer and fewer "good" schools, and maybe schools in general will all continue declining as a result. Not to mention that far too many students who might have been able to advance themselves (and society as a result) will be left behind.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Sunday August 30 2020, @12:08AM
This would be a fantastic solution. The problem is deciding how many children you are willing to sacrifice waiting for the fantastic solution instead of taking the fast-but-not-as-good solution.