School board approves Tayloe fundraising venture | Eastern North Carolina Now

    school chooses to teach collectivism rather than meritocracy

    Meeting in its regular monthly meeting on September 21, 2010 the Beaufort County Board of Education gave approval for a rather unique "fundraiser" at John Cotton Tayloe School. The idea is to ask parents/friends to donate money to the PTA rather than purchase traditional products such as candy, magazines etc. The salesmen will be the students.

    The board approved the proposal without opposition.

    The rationale for the project is explained in the two video clips below, with the first one being the principal, Mr. Bubs Carson.

    In order to appropriately assess the discussion you need to pick up on Mr. Carson's point about Tayloe serving second and third grade, only; so most of their students are 8-10 years old.

    The second video is the PTA President, Anne Pagnani, explaining the project.

    Originally the idea had faced some resistance at a school board committee meeting when it included "academic incentives" such as "Free Homework Passes" as rewards for raising a certain amount of money. With those type items removed, the proposal sailed through for approval.

    The goal is to raise about $8000. With a little over 600 students, that would mean that the average for each student would need to be about $13.33 to achieve the school's goal.

    Commentary

    One will also note that the incentive/reward system is based on "minimum participation" (of 1) with the group winning or losing, not on a meritocracy in which the top fundraisers are rewarded more that the lower fundraisers. It's not what you produce, but whether you play the game. There was no discussion among board members about when students will learn that life does not work that way.

    What we would like to know is which student comes up with the idea that rather than each student in their class turning in their money separately they all get together before school and pool the money and divide it among all the students in the class so the class can get the ice cream party. That's the student we will hope will be the principal, superintendent or school board member one day.

    But better than that, we'ld like to see what happens about the third or fourth time that trick is pulled. Perhaps we have an enterprising and creative teacher at Tayloe who will carpe diem to teach the difference between capitalism, socialism and communism with this project.

    while we're at it, this wonderful idea that every student will be treated as a success really bothers us because it deprieves the achievers of the satisfaction that they were "the best" performers. Perhaps the PTA will give those students a copy of Atlas Shrugged.

    Bless us and save us.

    Delma Blinson writes the "Teacher's Desk" column for our friend in the local publishing business: The Beaufort Observer. His concentration is in the area of his expertise - the education of our youth. He is a former teacher, principal, superintendent and university professor.