Slashdot Mirror
EdTech Funding Cut from Proposed FY06 budget
An anonymous reader writes "Bush's proposed FY06 budget eliminates a $500M Enhancing Education Through Technology program that is a major component of many schools' tech budgets. Rural school districts that serve underprivileged populations are going to be especially hard-hit, since they rely so heavily on technology to use educational resources that would otherwise be unavailable."
I, for one, don't think every 5th grader in my state needs an iBook
Let the local governments pay for it, if they want it. Boo hoo. You know, if we want to be sucked dry of fewer of our dollars, we have to MAKE CUTS. And that means we have to cut programs. And every program has a few fans. You can't please everyone. So quit whining. I need my income more than some twelve year old needs his IRC.
Further, since all of our tech jobs are going to India, why waste money training our own citizens for jobs that won't even be there?
Also, most families have a computer now. So we shouldn't have to rely on schools to introduce children to computers anymore than we rely on them to introduce our children to televisions or toasters.
I think for the most part the money given to schools for technology is wasted (it was at my school). Technology is not the only important thing to learn in school (far from it in my opinion), and I really feel like the money can be better spent on other things (like more and better teachers). The problem is that this cut isn't going to be used for something else in education. In effect Bush is cutting education spending in favor of spending on his imperial aspirations in the middle east, and that is what I take issue with.
It will swell market demand, and thus prices (bad) ...
It will give you less job security in 10 years (bad)
It will annoy the piss out of your as girls use thier l33t laptops as diaries, and put flowers on them
10 year old wardriving kids beating you are HL2... grrrrr
1 million laptops will be sold on ebay for the price of a concert ticket/belly piercing: GOOD!
For everything else, there is always mastercard fraud.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Two of my best friends are teachers. One at a high school and the other at a grammar school. The idea of either of them teaching technology to kids is frightening. The fact that they know how to use e-mail at all is a miracle.
Hiring a stock person in the electronics department of the local WalMart to teach technology would be a better investment of our tax dollars.
This space intentionally left blank.
But no worse than the last 35 years of Social Security being an off-the-books second ledger for the federal government.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
Here's a radical idea; how about making sure that kids can handle pencil-and-paper science and mathematics before we throw computers at them?
And let's be honest...short of some vocation training (typing, basic word processor-spreadsheet usage), what will kids use computers for that they can't get with books and a live teacher?
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Unfortunatly, budget cutting is never an easy task. I'm not saying that this particular program should or shouldn'e be cut, but the fact remains that in order to effectively cut costs, a line has to be drawn somewhere, and it's a certain guarantee that not everyone will agree where that line should be drawn.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
The school I used to teach at spent an unwholesome amount of money installing a satellite dish. This same school had about two or three working TVs, and additional TVs were not bought. Note: I'm not saying that this would have been a good investment even if we did have ample TVs, but it was a blaringly obvious waste of money in our case. (Not that this excuses anything, but the decision was made at a higher level, for all schools in our county.)
Also note that the amount of money would not have been at all unwholesome if it was spent on more important things, such as paying teachers more or (my preference) reducing class sizes.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Not that I disagree with your basic sentiment, but I am constantly flummoxed by those working a cash register who become completely unglued if I give them 4 dollars and a nickel for something that cost $3.80. They got confused because when they saw the 4 dollars they immediately entered 4 dollars as amount tendered, before noticing that I was also handing them a nickel.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Like books?
No sig for you!!
The federal government should not be spending a single penny on education.
Didn't you lefties learn ANYTHING from the Kerry loss? So many were beginning to understand the critical importance of states' rights and the need to genuinely limit the power of the feds.
And now this?
We need LESS federal spending on, oh, EVERYTHING. Not more! The less spending done by the federal government, the less it matters who is in office in DC. If the federal budget was just a few billion, Bush could be made president for life and you'd barely notice any difference in anything.
And BTW, the budget may have beed proposed by Bush, but it still has to be introduced to congress by representatives and voted on and passed by congress.
Really the budget is much more the fault of congress than the president. They don't even have to look at his proposed budget and could create one of their own to vote on and pass if they wanted to.
Blame Congress first and most of all if you don't like what's in the budget.
Government IS the problem.
All of the senate: FUCK THE POOR!
Senator: Good!
Yeah, right.
Sure, it might. It might also demoralize the teachers and actually have a negative impact. It depends partially on whether the people spending the money spend any time in the actual classrooms that the money will affect. If not, then most likely they will spend the money unwisely. I'm not saying that only the teachers know how the money should be spent (although it wouldn't be a bad idea to seek their counsel), just that before money is spent, a little time (and money) should be invested making sure that those who are spending the money are at least passingly familiar with those they are spending the money on.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
What he said minus the attack on Kerry*. Give me my money back and we'll decide where the money should go at the local level.
*John F. Kerry - the haughty, french-looking Massachusetts Democrat, who by the way served in Vietnam and delivered weapons to the Khmer Rouge**.
**Kerry's claim on Meet the Press on 1/30/05.
Why should I as a taxpayer in California pay for computers for kids in Wyoming? What business does the federal government have taking my hard-earned tax dollars and shipping them across the country??
Now that we have a conservative president and a conservative congress, it's time to pass a conservative budget. Cut or eliminate all social programs, reduce taxes dramatically, and let issues like EdTech be funded at the local level if citizens choose to fund them.
People in rural america just don't think about the day to day things the government does for them. Instead they vote on guns, god, and gays.
They voted for him, i didnt.
The Federal government shouldn't be in the business of funding education in the first place.
Now, with the federal funds gone, the individual states will have to decide if they want to make up that money in their school budgets. Which means it will be state leaders making important decisions about spending and taxes for kids in state X, not federal leaders. And the state leaders in state X are more accountable to the citizens of the state, which gives those citizens a (small) measure more control over the process.
How anybody can say this is bad, boggles the imagination. Maybe people in North Carolina want this, and people in Vermont don't (for example). Fine, each can have their way now. Likewise for every other state.
The more power / taxation / spending we move from the Federal government down to the State and Local governments the better. This has the effect of moving the decision making closer to the people it impacts, which gives them more control (ie, it's easier for an individual to affect the outcome of a race for County Commissioner, than for US Senate). Likewise, the more things are handled on a local level, the more we enable people with similar views to move into the same geographic region, and run things as they see fit, instead of having an all powerful Federal government issuing policies that will always leave a huge percentage of the population pissed off. (This applies not just to education spending of course, but pretty much everything).
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
"School is like starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned." -- John Taylor Gatto
American high schools often do resemble prisons, and not simply because they tend to be large, impersonal institutions filled with gangs, drugs, and cops or because they tend to prize order above all else. The real parallel is that they are both filled with many people who would rather be elsewhere.
Anyone with a basic understanding of human rights finds compulsory education unconscionable. Forced indoctrination is just about the worst thing short of physical torture you can do to a human being. One can aruge that parents have the right to home/private school their children, but often parent's don't have the economic means to do so, and often private schools, in particular porocial schools, are more coersive and more perverted-- with both the truth and the children themselves--then public schools! Teenagers are free human beings who deserve to have equil access to all kinds of information to rationally decide how they should best spend their time. Who cares if a public school has the funds to provide an OC-3 if they plan on censoring it. The education reform movement needs to stop quibiling about funding and get to the heart of the issue...authoritarian propagandists are destroying humanity's natural curiosity and ability to learn. If you want a better education for yourself and your peers, there's plenty to do: write a book, build a beowulf cluster, get involved in politics (anything involving direct action), smash your local school, get elected to your school board and fire all the administration, reward truency spent doing something more educational and socially benificial then passivly obaying some dogmatic instructor. Public education should be about providing resorces for those who want them; the community college, internet, and municipal library are useful paradigms and we should augment them to provide for a free, as in speech and as in beer, education. Modern pedagogy must become a democratic intrest. If you care about your fellow citizens knowing enough about the world to deserve the right to vote, if you want to work in an economy where sustainability and efficiency supplant bureaucratic monopoly and idiotic policy, if you give a fuck about freedom and knowledge, the time to act is now.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
Call, me crazy, but I think that educating people is more important and better for humanity than killing others...
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
[1] For the record, I'm still trying to figure out if his SS plan is good or bad overall. However, excluding the numbers from the budget is wrong and deceitful.
/ editorial/01aaedit.txt
...
Oh, my me. I get to have some fun with this given some information I just read in the paper yesterday. Lets see if I can find a link.
Summary: Social Security pays shit on returns and state run pension plans give back a much better return.
http://dcexaminer.com/articles/2005/02/08/opinion
Article text, since it won't be there forever:
Dems favor privatized accounts for a few
Published: Tuesday, February 8, 2005 12:56 PM EST E-mail this story | Print this page
If Social Security is such a great deal for American workers, as its supporters insist, then why are more than 5 million of them desperately trying to keep out of the program?
Thanks to the way Social Security was established 70 years ago, state and local government workers in 15 states aren't covered by Social Security. These teachers, firefighters and police officers don't pay a penny into the program, putting money instead into state-run pension programs. And if they spend their entire careers in these state jobs, they get nothing out of Social Security. Their retirement income is financed entirely by these state plans.
Groups like the AARP, formerly known as the American Association of Retired Persons, want to force these folks into Social Security as a way to shore the program up. As the AARP sees it, once they start paying 12.4 percent of wages just like everyone else does, a total of $200 billion will pour into the bankrupt system.
The idea meets intense resistance from the state pension program managers, giant public-sector unions such as the American Federal of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) -- and prominent Democrats who are normally singing the benefits of Social Security.
Better than Social Security . . .
Why? Because it turns out that these state and local pensions offer a far better deal that Social Security.
The Louisiana State Empoloyee's Retirement System (LASERS) notes that a state worker who earned an average $35,000 a year and retired at age 65 would get more than $2,100 a month from LASERS -- but a paltry $886 per month from Social Security. "LASERS's monthly benefit is almost two and a half times higher," it noted in an article decrying reform ideas like the AARP's. Plus, many of these state workers can retire at age 55 with full benefits, and most provide disability and survivor benefits.
As Kennedy, Kerry, Reid, Boxer and other more than a dozen other Democrats and Republicans, noted in a 2001 letter to President Bush's Social Security commission: "Millions of our constituents receive higher retirement benefits from their current public pensions than they would under Social Security."
Because it invests in stocks and bonds...
How, exactly, do these state and local governments manage this trick? As LASERS put it, the state's benefits are substantially higher than Social Security because the contributions the workers and their employers make into the program are -- gasp! -- "invested in a mix of equities, bonds and other investments whose return far exceeds returns earned under Social Security's fixed income-only approach."
The director of Ohio's Public Employees Retirement System reported in testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee that "over 80 percent of our benefit disbursements are paid by investment income." Investment income, imagine that!
Seems that if investment in stocks and bonds is a good enough retirement plan for a school teacher in Boston, then it ought to be good enough for a factory worker in Detroit.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
That should have been slashed years ago.
Technology in most schools is a WASTE Of money.
they have no use for it a good 90% of the time.
Not to mention the massive fraud that was involved in tech spending at schools.
We need to eliminate those damn solcialist institutions that our lovely government keeps trying to set up and move to a pure market-based society.
Yeah, right.
I'm just saying that it would be nice if they threw a bit more money towards schools and less towards the war machine.
It reminds me of a bumper sticker I once saw: "It will be a fine day in the US when schools get the funding they need and the Air Force will have to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber."
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks