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Wages Aren't the Only Reason Teachers Are Striking (axios.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Schools in 39 of 50 states have seen decreases in funding for instructional materials for their students, according to data from the Urban Institute. These conditions have sparked a wave of teacher activism across the country. Educators have had to pay for supplies themselves to provide new materials for students at times. Teachers' salaries aren't enough to pay for materials, either. In some cases they have to pay for materials for dozens of children. Teachers are having to teach students with materials that are defective, outdated and inefficient because of a lack of funding going to state education budgets -- particularly in Republican states.
In part, because our tax money ( and a percentage of lottery winnings ) are supposed to go to the schools.
But of course politicians get their grimy little hands on a budget, and it all goes to shit. This is in part why I
A) Almost always vote against the incumbent
B) *ALWAYS* *ALWAYS* *ALWAYS* vote against tax increases.
They have enough of my cash. If they can't pay for basic services with the stacks of green they pull out of my ass, that's they're fuck up not mine, and I won't fund any further idiocy.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
has a projected budget that averages out to about $37,400 per student.
I know there are considerations like property upkeep, and administration, but holy moly, why not just bus them to a nearby community college at that rate?
A: the rich should be able to run the country to suit themselves
B: there aren't enough people who would buy that premise, so throw in theocracy to bring in the votes of those thugs
The rich hate public education; they send their children to private schools, and don't see why every else can't, too. Theocrats hate any education beyond rote reading, writing, and arithmetic, because their children might ask awkward questions if they were taught to think.
Teachers are having to teach students with materials that are defective, outdated and inefficient because of a lack of funding going to state education budgets -- particularly in Republican states.
Are the comparatively flush budgets in Democratic states producing better outcomes for their students?
First: Their big unions are so powerful that they are some of the biggest campaign contributors in many states, which results in the people the union bosses want running the state education bureaucracies. The individual teachers may object to this idea and claim they do not like the people in charge, but those denials are false. By supporting their union bosses who in turn pick and support the education burueacrats they are in fact selecting the policies.
Second: In places like California, the teachers support all the other state workers (who respond by supporting the teachers) and ALL these state workers collectively use their political might to get incredibly generous pensions. Teachers love to complin about paltry pay, but they also love to have the public not notice that the pay is for only about 9 months per year of work and does not include pension and heath benefits that dwarf the retirement benefits of most of the parents of the kids in the schools. Lots of state workers in California retire and collect as much (or more) per year in retirement than while they worked. Thus, one should actually say that the teachers are being compensated at more than twice the rate they publicly claim to be paid.
Third: In most of the country the teachers are members of one of two national unions who are aligned with the Democart party. The Democrat party sees a future of absolute power guaranteed by the demographic shifts they are driving with support for massive immigration. The teachers thus are, through their unions, supporting the massive immigration that has overrun many school districts with lots of undereducated kids with a myriad of special needs including many foreign languages and customs.
The primary reasons so many states are failing to pay for the necessary basic school supplies is that they are instead funding state worker pensions as demanded by the unions and they are obeying the courts in funding all the multilingual stuff required by all the immigrant kids they themselves (via their union bosses and the DNC) imported into the country. There are more immigrant kids in the United States today than ever before in American history - MILLIONS came in during the 8 years of Obama, which followed the not-quite-as-high 8 years of GW Bush high immigration policies.
America today is spending more money per pupil on education than it ever has in American history. The results do not justify the costs.
It is likely that your quality of life would improve if you paid significantly MORE taxes. In addition to you paying more taxes the rich would pay more taxes. That additional tax would outweigh your contribution. And then you could get roads, bridges, working schools, police, etc.
When everyone is supported by proper public funding, everything works properly. You would prosper despite your selfish inclination.
This idea that everyone should pay nothing in taxes is why we can't have good things. If we pay too little tax, the system decays and we get nothing. If the roads work and the trash system works and the air is clean and the schools are well supplied and safe then the world is great and everything improves. And paying tax does that.
The problem isn't the amount of money allocated for schools. The problem is where that money goes - namely, to bloated administrative costs. Fire half of the non-teaching staff, set the salaries of the rest so that no one earns more than the teachers, and - magic - suddenly schools will have plenty of money.
Of course, that's only the first problem with public education in the US. There are a whole lot of other problems: the culture of passing students who ought to fail, the inability to fire incompetent teachers, discipline problems, etc...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
> Universities and colleges in the US don't provide textbooks out of tuition costs. Pushing it down a level or two makes just as much sense as not doing so.
I worked at a rural school district for a while and part of my job was doing analysis of student performance compared to various out-of-school factors. I was stunned and humbled to find out how many of the kids literally had no permanent home. They'd move throughout the school district several times a year because their families were couch-surfing from house to house. And these weren't high-school kids (almost adults)... these were kids younger than 10. Their only regular meals came from the school.
With kids in this kind of situation, there's no way their parents are buying books when they can't even feed them and put a roof over their heads.
Teachers in the US are paid more than in a lot of other countries that deliver better performance. And within the US, there is little correlation between teacher salary and teacher performance. The US isn't going to move up from its mediocre PISA scores by paying teachers more. Instead, what the US needs to do is to give parents more choice and control over where their kids get educated and what they learn. Few people would voluntarily pay $10000/year for the crappy education that their kids are getting. Schools that don't live up to the requirements of parents need to be closed aggressively and their teachers fired.
We should also remove the special perks for teachers: they should work a full working year, with a few weeks off, get the same kind of health insurance as other people in their income bracket, and get 401(k) or 403(b) plans instead of pensions.
I buy office supplies and even software for my work because the administrative headaches of ordering such are often not worth the hassle. I'd rather work on IT than procurement paperwork. I've done this at multiple companies. Bad apples often cheat the procurement such that many orgs end up putting in lots of roadblocks.
True, I'm probably paid better than most teachers, though. Still, for smaller things, it often just makes life easier to go get them yourself.
Table-ized A.I.
So the solution is let the kids remain ignorant? Do you suppose not teaching them a lesson will teach the politicians a lesson?
Sheesh... Talk about completely un-productive voting habits...
If you vote out your politicians regardless if they do a good job that doesn't exactly promote responsible government as you don't have the chance of being voted out if you do a bad job driving you to actually do a good job. Instead you have the certainty of being voted out ensuring that you really don't need to give as damn as any issues you end up causing, like say a serious budget shortfall due to excessive tax cuts, is going to be the your replacement's problems.
As for the "no tax increases, never!"-attitude, that really doesn't work at all for tax revenue drops or increased costs, particularly unexpected ones (like natural disasters). The only options that leaves you with are cutting down on essential services, taking on debt or moving around money in the budget like how they move away money that's supposed to go to education into other essential services when lottery money starts coming in.
"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it."
Well no, as a parent it's pretty much your responsibility to make sure your kids get an appropriate education - the state offers it for free, but if you think that's ever been a high bar you should look at what past generations weren't taught (and what not being able to read or do math cost them).
I have never put faith in our education system to teach my kids what they need to know - sure, they'll pick up *some* of the fundamentals, but if you're not willing to spend some time filling in the gaps you're a YUGE part of the problem.
Department of Defense would be a great start - the amount of money funneled into that sinkhole is an abomination of fiscal management.
Maybe if the concern is immigrants, we redirect some of THAT money to solving the "border problem" instead of taking money out of our teachers' pockets. When you make a job undesirable to good people, you get bad people doing those jobs.
It's not fucking complicated.
Equal outcome is communism. Equal opportunity is basically what the US was originally founded for.
And it doesn't come closer to equal opportunity than teaching everyone on equal footing, then let them go out into the world and become what they can become based on the education they got.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Or you could just inform yourself and vote for an honest politician, campaign for this politiician, or even run as an honest politician yourself. Don't you think that's more productive?
Ideally, yes. But not all parents actually know the material themselves. Even where they do, schools have a bad habit of expecting the knowledge in a specific form and marking off on correct answers if the reasoning doesn't parrot the book.
Math (arithmetic) is a classic example. It's not enough to be good at arithmetic, you have to understand "new math" or they'll get marked wrong even with correct answers. So even a parent who excels in the subject may not be much help.
Then there are single parents with more than one job. They may simply not have enough left at the end of their day to be much help to the kids.
Or, perhaps they got the same crappy "education" when they were in school.
Luckily, you aren't actually required to pay any attention whatsoever to the university sports, even if you go there
Unluckily, you are actually required to pay.
For the most part the reason for "more spent, less results" is that a lot of that money is disappearing into the black profit hole of private education in the form of "incentives" and voucher systems. Meanwhile in poorer areas the heads of school districts are like mini Scott Pruitts, assigning themselves long trips in the Caribbean with money that should have been earmarked for finally getting science books that are not from the 70s.
Things like diversity, tolerance and environmental awareness are mostly taught because they require no materials. There's no money for the science experiments, zero tolerance means they can't even go outside and pick up branches for ecology or art projects, math and critical thinking are "frowned upon" as being anti-religious, and systems like NCLB ensure that most of the time allotted to studying is wasted on rote memorization of specific things that will be on specific standardized tests, to the excessive detriment of children learning anything - should a school do badly in those as a result of trying to teach them, their budget will be slashed further.
Special education's also cut severely over the years, which means the two autistic screecher in the class of 35 are disrupting everything all the time, and rapidly eroding over the years the teacher's ability to even fucking care.
In part, because our tax money ( and a percentage of lottery winnings ) are supposed to go to the schools.
But of course politicians get their grimy little hands on a budget, and it all goes to shit. This is in part why I
A) Almost always vote against the incumbent
B) *ALWAYS* *ALWAYS* *ALWAYS* vote against tax increases.
They have enough of my cash. If they can't pay for basic services with the stacks of green they pull out of my ass, that's they're fuck up not mine, and I won't fund any further idiocy.
The USA is one of the less taxed developed country. Don't be surprised if your public services suck. You get what you pay for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
So now we must understand the unique expression of love for children by depriving them of an education, by the right wing. Isn't it odd that the right wing states that oppose abortion are also the states who offer the least for children? That means they want far more children born while they spend even lest to raise children properly. To keep it simple, right wing beliefs are severely irrational.
Yep, only the Republicans were responsible for all that debt. I'll give you a clue - both parties are bad.
Bill Clinton left office with a budget surplus. The last W budget was more than $1T in the red. The last Obama budget was $600M in the red, when $200M of tax cuts were added in an attempt to appease Republicans. The one before that was $400M in the red. Meanwhile, the Trump tax cuts are ballooning the deficit nicely.
Tell me again how both parties are equally bad when it comes to budget deficits.
Illinois is run lock stock and barrel by Democrats
You better tell current Illinois governor Bruce Rauner that he's a Democrat. He'll be rather surprised, since he's a Republican.
Also, the Illinois legislature has 67 D seats and 51 R seats. While that gives Democrats control of the legislature, it's pretty far from "lock stock and barrel". That would be more like California, with 53 D seats and 25 R seats and the governor.
Obamacare was a disaster
To call something a 'disaster', you've got to indicate the criteria you are measuring with.
There's a lot more people with health insurance that they can afford. There's also things like the elimination of lifetime limits and minimum required coverage that isn't shit if you happen to have ovaries. Those are rather positive if you are measuring by "less people dying because their checking account doesn't have 7 figures in it".
It wasn't cheap, but it wasn't supposed to be - the theory is free market competition would drive down prices over time and "over time" takes a while. After all, "Obamacare" was the plan designed for Bob Dole (R) to give in response to Bill Clinton's health care reform efforts, so it hews very close to "free markets" and other Republican shibboleths. That's why Republican Mitt Romney passed it in Massachusetts.
Obama mistakenly thought that if he proposed a Republican reform plan with a couple tweaks (such as where subsidies faded out), then some Republicans would support the plan. And you can see how that worked out.
Btw, "Obamacare", like most Republican social spending plans, is not a good plan. It assumes health care is an efficient market, and that's just not possible. But the assumption that all markets are efficient is core to modern Republicanism, so it had to be in the plan.
Goldman Sachs bought both parties years ago
Well, whatever you do, continue to pretend that all politicians are equally awful. That way there's no reward for bucking Goldman Sachs and thus getting the changes you want.
Nope, I can not. 70% of the 8th graders nationwide fail reading proficiency. Most also lack in other knowledge — like distinguishing between mass and weight, Ukraine and Russia, Conservatism and Fascism.
That's a massive failure (or, worse, deliberate wrong-doing) of those same teachers, whose Unions are spending millions of dollars on the positive spin in mass-media and Slashdot.
You would not continue ordering pizza from the same place, after they quadruple their prices without any improvements in quality. How can you expect me to continue buying education (for myself or my neighbors) in the same circumstances?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.