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Is Google's Non-Tax Based Public School Funding Cause For Celebration?
theodp (442580) writes "Google's "flash-funding" of teachers' projects via DonorsChoose continues to draw kudos from grateful mayors of the nation's largest cities. The latest comes from Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto (fresh from a Google-paid stay at the Google Zeitgeist resort), who joined Google officials at Taylor Allderdice HS, where Google announced it was 'flash funding' all Pittsburgh area teachers' crowd-funding campaigns on DonorsChoose.org. DonorsChoose reports that Google spent $64,657 to fund projects for 10,924 Pittsburgh kids. While the not-quite-$6-a-student is nice, it does pale by comparison to the $56,742 Google is ponying up to send one L.A. teacher's 34 students to London and Paris and the $35,858 it's spending to take another L.A. teacher's 52 kids to NYC, Gettysburg, and DC. So, is Google's non-tax based public school funding — which includes gender-based funding as well as "begfunding" — cause for celebration?"
Is that the newspeak for golddigging?
I bet if you rewrote this summary, you could probably stuff a few more link$ in there. You know, because that's what we prefer ... clicking to some random site rather than reading the content here.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
We can defund public education since google now pays for it.
The way to fix schools is meaningless trips to foreign locations because all of the movies are about that and they work out fine.
I feel like they're selling drugs to school children and bribing the authority figures into encouraging it.
money for education is good.. being turned into a corporate drone before middle school is not
Yes, it is cause for celebration. Even if there are inconsistencies in its funding practices, we should always celebrate any positive actions. By this we encourage others to do likewise.
But I recall watching Penn Jillette making an argument for charity and against government funding a while back on some cable news interview. Oh, Piers Morgan; it was a while back.
Mind you, I like Penn, and I don't think the government always makes the wisest decisions with money, but the concept that people directly funding critical social infrastructure would be enough to keep our system afloat frightens the hell out of me. Crowdfunding hasn't exactly proven a smashing success across the board. And there are charities that will collect donations and make grants based on where their focus and community needs intersect, but then find themselves run afoul of some of the same complaints about accountability the government does (which, at least with charities, seems as much driven by people who think they should be funding one thing and not another as anything else.)
It's kind of a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. I don't think most individuals or companies have the wherewithal and patience to research individually all of the aspects of our society that could use charity, rank them, and fund the most important. But when that authority is delegated to another entity, whether a grantmaker or a government, they want to be able to exercise a level of control over their (and others!) funds that is impractical. And I find myself leaning towards having a dedicated entity allocating funds because, well, there are causes everybody wants to fund and causes few particularly care about, and whether or not people care may often more be a result of awareness-building than it is the actual value-per-dollar impact to society.
ideals of the ideal society. It is fixed by members of that society, not Google or any other self-interested $mega_corp.
Thank you, Google, for your public works. Spending a tiny percentage of the amount tax that you save by screwing countries over using the Double Irish Arrangement with a Dutch Sandwich is really a great marketing ploy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement
http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/10/to-reduce-its-tax-burden-google-expands-use-of-the-double-irish/
http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/01/silicon-valley-attempts-to-slow-new-global-tax-avoidance-reform-proposals/
Now you get to join the ranks of other philanthropic entities, such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Maybe you'll buy more good faith by funding NPR.
Project A: Project to help anyone learn a certain skill set and better themselves
Project B: Project to help men transition into primarily female dominated career paths
Project C: Project to help women transition into primarily male dominated feidls
Here's how this plays out:
Project A: gets lots of applications from all walks of life and helps everyone interested until they run out of funding.
Project B: gets many male applicants, project goes smoothly, a female applicant is denied, then launches a law suite for discrimination project B dies because the life blood was sucked out of it by an unhappy woman
Project C: helps many women, no men try to apply and even if they do they simply accept they're not invited to this party, then it continues much like project A
So, is Google's non-tax based public school funding
They pay billions in profits to an empty office in the Carribbean so they don't have to pay taxes, and give a small portion of that money back through school funding, and take that as a tax deduction.
In the process, they get enormous influence over the educational agenda. It is largely in a direction Slashdotters can agree with, but imagine it was a church doing this.
Like Al Capone giving some of his money to the Chicago slums, it may be better than if they weren't doing it, but it hardly gets Google out of the crooked, lobbying megacorp set.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
This further dilutes the ideal of free public education for all Americans. Rich benefactors are great, but they should not be deciding where the funds are directed.
We have a real and very visible problem with public education. Google is simply using it to promote their brand.
Here's a link to the Google Zeitgeist website. Maybe your Mayor can loan you his username and password if you're curious. :-)
Yeah, I'd rather that Google paid the taxes that it owes to the US government. That would end up putting more money into the schools than $40K here and $60K there for one-off trips.
Of course not, they're just using sex as the only reason to decide who should get what. Lots of things happened in the past that disadvantaged women, so it's only fair if the guys today are made to pay for the past crimes of people who share the same genetic makeup.
It may be argued to have a moral duty to pay them, but 'owe' implies a legal obligation. The reality is that corporate lobbyists have created some loop holes that the corporations are legally using to avoid paying what they don't have to pay. However unless you forgo ALL the tax claw backs you are eligible for, it is questionable if you have a right to criticise Google.
If the Tax law permit this they are going to use it
if schools were properly funded and maintained they would not need it (Corporate money in education )
If they cared i would be illegal ( money must go to non profit school helping Organization )
there a lot breakfast of all , After school help , social you name-it ect...
As long as Google continues to support and fund ALEC and its anti-education agenda, anything goes back will be far outweighed by the millions taken from education by ALEC model legislation.
So basicly good has financial control over public education. Even without making demands, it is now understood that google is a player than you pander to for funding. So Administrators will adjust coursework, perhaps disciplinary actions, etc... not only to cater to what google wants done, but perhaps might even start censoring negtive opinions about google in the classroom.
Then, it becomes very possible that google can use financial incentives, penalties, and other more "active" measures to ensure compliance with their goals.
Many of google's goals in the short term seem noble, and I am thankful for this, but its a really bad dangerous trend towards privitization that can take a really nasty turn down the road if it ever takes hold. It also sets precident and opens the door for other companies to do the same.
What we are going to have in 25 years, is a return to feudalism, where various companies control all matters of public life in various diffrent spaces, and their users will be made to fight against eachother for the sake of the company.
We see this beginning with Apple vs Google vs Microsoft. They have entire continuums of space where you are expected to use the entire range of company products, and socially identify with the company, and your fellow users.
First they fight like hell to dodge taxes, then they spend money in public goods in place of taxpayer money.
The difference is that taxpayer money is spent under democratic control (or at least it should be, your mileage may vary depending on how much your political system is kinked). And Google will probably spend depending on its own interest instead of on the general interest.
In a working democracy the public would be able to decide what to do with the tax money. However since in the US the democratic system is severely broken, it's not surprising parallel systems are starting to come up.
this amount of money is trivial to Google and not even a blip when it comes to public education spending. It is highly doubtful anyone will be pandering for this -- add a few more zeros, then maybe. This is also not precedent setting. Corporations have been donating to schools for a very long time. Companies donate time, equipment, food, and money to school. They give discounts on software and hardware. They pay for robotics teams. It would be exceptional for Google to not participate as other companies of its stature have already done.
From the headline through the body this is written to inspire a non-critical negative reaction.
All the money mentioned by the OP that was directly spent by Google is about the salary, resource, and insurance costs for ONE veteran software engineer.
Here's what happened: A handful of directors got together in some enclave of the overgrown dorm-scape that is Google's HQ, and one of them stood up and said "I'm sick of managing coders all day, I wanna fix the educational system instead!"
And they got a new position created with this very charter, with funding pulled from some other less-protected project, because if the other directors said "no", then he/she could potentially raise a huge stink, bring down a bunch of other pet projects, and unearth enough dead bodies to get a few people fired. Best to say "yes", call it "outreach", and let them have their fun.
Honestly, these projects and this money could have come from any private citizen, and in fact DOES elsewhere on DonorsChoose, but since Google can claim involvement, Google is rattling for press coverage. Just remember that, like everything else Google does, it's funded by money laundered from advertisers. The apple doesn't fall too far from the tree.
Just remove the tax deduction for charitable contributions. Evil corporations and 1%-ers (Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, etc.) just use it to keep their money out of government tax coffers, and spend it on their priorities, not the politicians' priorities.
Apk made you "Run, Forrest: RUN" from answering 15 questions http://slashdot.org/comments.p... and you failed to disprove his points on hosts superiority over adblock.
My wife is a teacher and her school has been very successful with DonersChoose. It is kind of amazing actually. The various classrooms have added/upgraded/replaced technology in just about every classroom. The teachers get exactly what they want and it typically takes less than two weeks from the time the teacher writes up the request until the product is in the classroom. The parents this year have already bought new tablets for the class--right at 10 days total time from asking until the devices were in the kid's hands. Hard to argue with results. Beats the six plus months (if ever) from the old request process. The school has even adopted a new process to ensure the devices get configured and secured according to the school's IT policy that gets the job done without interuption to the teacher or class. (i.e. the new stuff doesn't arrive--then sit on some IT guy's desk for a month waiting for them to get around to putting an asset tag on the device.)
Because people have the right, under law, to create corporations and benefit from them, they inherit much the same right to act in the interest of those people as those people have. [Yes, this has probably been over-extended in the Supreme Court case that lets them do political donations to their hearts' content]. However the core idea in the organisation of a society is that laws lock in rights and expectations; if I set up an organisation with certain rights, then I have to right to expect to see those right protected.
Specifically if I invest money in a corporation with certain rights, I have the right to expect to see those rights not tampered with. What you are proposed is to overthrow that principle - technically this constitutes a breach of the constraint on the Congress not to pass a 'post facto' law - see section 9 of the US constitution, Whilst you may regret this situation, to assert that the situation can be reversed is not legitimate.
What Google's PR / charity funding is, it's a reminder that our society and our government (reflecting the public's apathy and lack of intense desire to provide our kids better education and to FUND it with our taxes so it will happen) are running a system that's not only very underfunded, it's not built to evenly distribute what funding we do get.
So some kids get an order of magnitude or even two orders of magnitude more spent on their education. Leading millions to get the kind of crap education that gives them near-zero chance of bootstrapping themselves out of multigenerational cycles of poverty, crime, gangs, drugs, and other bullshit that doesn't just harm them and their families, but the rest of our society.
Google's spending isn't even a bandaid on the problem. More like a micro-bandaid too small to be seen without a microscope.
In extremis. Of course you are right that laws change all the time, but at some level the constitutional principle has some significance. Certainly whole scale expropriation without compensation of things owned by corporations would be illegitimate. The issue is where to draw the line; the challenge is to resist being totally dogmatic in both directions!
Certainly whole scale expropriation without compensation of things owned by corporations would be illegitimate.
You mean nationalization? It's legal if you pass a law that says it is.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Expropriation is the theft of a company by the state with no compensation - or as a result of a court order in connection with something else. Nationalisation is the state taking ownership but paying the owners a fair price for the assets. There is obviously a spectrum here; many Asian owned businesses in East Africa in the 60s and 70s were 'nationalised', but the price was paid in government bonds in an non-convertible currency that promptly inflated to zero value.
In the Western context, the process of nationalisation is essentially the same as compulsory purchase of land with a similar expectation of fair value paid. To do otherwise does constitute the state stealing the asset, and would probably constitute a post facto law; this, of course is why we have constitutions...