11/30/97
  
 
Egalitarian sentiments sometimes do more harm than good, because it's usually easier to make things uniformly worse than it is to make them uniformly better. 
     That could happen in the Denver Public Schools, where board member Bennie Milliner is concerned that parents' financial support for an all-day kindergarten at Kaiser Elementary School is somehow unfair. 
     Parents whose children are in the program pay $133 a month to cover the additional costs. 
     That's pretty steep, and obviously there are a great many Denver families that couldn't afford it, even if their neighborhood schools had room to set up such a program. And the school district can't afford to offer it to everybody. 
     But does that mean parents should not be permitted to provide it themselves? Only according to the doctrinaire egalitarian principle that nobody should be better off than anybody else. 
     That's not a particularly admirable sentiment. And it has unfortunate practical consequences as well; if parents can't get what they want from the Denver Public Schools, some of them will leave. And they're the families DPS should particularly want to keep; well-educated, middle-class parents (of all races) who have high expectations for their children and contribute much more than money to their children's schools. 
     Those children already have many advantages that the district can't readily duplicate, but driving them away will not help the students who are left behind. 
     When Milliner came to talk to the News  before the school board election, he said he believes the district should put extra resources into schools where the children bring fewer advantages from home. 
     ``Equity is not the same as equality,'' he said then. 
     I agree. Money is not a cure-all for educational problems, and in fact the correlation between a state's spending and its achievement is negative. Beyond some necessary minimum, more money doesn't seem to make much difference. 
     But there are certain specific things it's worth spending money on. Reading, for instance. Reading difficulties show up early, and the schools shouldn't wait until they get bad news from the state's fourth-grade test to give extra help to the children who need it. 
     Whatever that takes _ smaller classes, one-on-one tutoring _ the district has to do it, even though it means some schools will be spending more than others on reading. 
     Most parents will agree that's fair, even if it also means that the school their children attend has a little less to spend than it otherwise would. 
     They may, however, want to make up some of the difference by helping to pay for specific things they want for their children. At Kaiser, it may be all day kindergarten; at other schools parents chip in for art or athletics or computers. 
     As long as they aren't taking anything away from other people's children, that's fair, too.