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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 Teachers are having to teach students with materials that are defective, outdated and inefficient because of a lack of funding going to state education budgets -- particularly in Republican states.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 my country its up to the parents to buy textbooks and materials for their children. Why isn't it like that in the USA? Or do only rich White or Asian parents do that, not the poor or Black or Hispanic parents?
after many years living in a borderilne slum (cheap rent from relatives who owned the place). The first thing he noticed is he didn't have to buy nearly as many school supplies as he did when his kids went to a poor district.
In America we use property taxes to fund individual school districts. This means we've got nice, rich districts and lousy poor ones. This is by design. I've read one of the Scandinavian countries has laws about schools being funded equally to prevent just these kind of shenanigans. I'd love to see those kind of laws here in the States. As an added bonus it'd make forced busing pointless outside of specialty magnet schools.
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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?
My take on it is that the budgeting at public schools is as big of a mess as budgeting at NASA. Way too much is wasted on legacy make-work boondoggle cronyist handouts. In the last slashdot discussion of this, someone linked to this image which pretty succinctly summarizes the problem. This is magnified by the problem of school administrators getting a large salary increase in the last year or two of work before retirement, because their pension is based on their salary at the point of retirement; and thus they get an inflated pension.
I was thinking that regulations could mandate a maximum portion of a school's staff that is non-teaching administrative staff, but then those staff members would teach 1 hour a year to be classified as 'teaching staff' thus gaming the system, so there'd need to be a stricter definition of 'teaching staff' as well. Aside from a nurse, janitors, principal, career counselor, and social worker, how many other administrators do you need?
A book I read years ago on how to fix America's schools advocated using zero-based budgeting and cutting non-academic 'side-shows' like sports teams, then starting school a couple hours later, once children are actually awake enough to learn. A related book ('The End of Homework') also advocated eliminating homework as a way to save time that'd be better spent on one-to-one assistance.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
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?
The GP obviously attended one of the poorer schools in the US.
A well-run democracy requires educated citizens. The state of school systems in poor neighborhoods is by design. Those in charge want only the "right" kind of voters to be educated.
Theocrats hate any education beyond rote reading
Actually, the Church hated Martin Luther because he advocated plebeians reading the Bible for themselves, rather than only the priests who knew Latin being able to read it for them, and telling them what it 'REALLY' means. So they don't always like literacy either. That said, Muslims are expected to be able to read the Koran for themselves (and even memorize it).
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
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.
Maybe the middle class should get tired of being lied to and paying for tax breaks for the wealthiest members of society. Then, possibly, we'd get things working a bit better.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
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.
That said, Muslims are expected to be able to read the Koran for themselves (and even memorize it).
In the islamic world, it's not considered necessary to actually speak arabic in order to memorize the koran - you can memorize it just fine without understanding a word of what it says. And the goal is really memorisation, and not reading, in order to make a difference between in-group and out-group people, not to actually gain any kind of knowledge or wisdom.
Quite the opposite: I want education to become an enterprise where good teachers are highly rewarded and bad teachers are fired; where good schools are rewarded and bad schools are closed.
The public education system as it is rewards good and batch teachers largely alike, because all those benefits and perks of the job accrue to teachers regardless of their quality. I want the money that is currently wasted on bad teachers and bad schools to go to the good teachers and good schools instead.
If you vote out your politicians regardless if they do a good job
That's not really the problem. The problem is that once they get in it's damn near impossible to get them out of office no matter how badly they do. Incumbents get re-elected at rates over 90% thanks to a combination of voter apathy, gerrymandering, confirmation bias, and other factors.
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).
Of course you are correct but good luck getting that fact to penetrate the skull of your typical "taxes = evil" republican or worse, one of the tea party variety. So now we have a national debt of around $21 Trillion which is about $65,000 owed for each man, woman and child in the US. The ONLY way this is going to go away is to raise taxes combined with some rather drastic cuts to the military and/or medicare. (the rest of the budget isn't big enough to make a difference) The fact that tax revenues fluctuate is utterly lost in the political debate.
OK, showing my age here, but I remember when paper and pencils and such were provided by the school. You could, at your option, bring in your own (and notebooks, ring binders, and such, and we did. . . ), but basic materials were provided by the school.
I also remember being a little shocked when I enrolled my daughters in public school (this was early-to-mid 1990s) they were given a list of supplies to bring in. A list that grew longer every year.
At the same time, I noted that the libraries lacked recent books, and there were nearly as many "resources" as there were teachers. A K-5 elementary school had **3** secretaries and a vice-principal.
In retrospect, I suspect the two are related, and also to the growth of administrators in post-secondary education.
Muslim here. I don't know why Joannesg got voted Troll because what he said is 100% accurate. If you go to any non-Arabic speaking country and talk to the Muslims there, very few of them will be able to speak Arabic or translate it for you.
I have nephews and nieces in the UK who have all read the Quran. A couple of them have memorized it, but if you ask them to translate a random verse into English, they won't be able to because they don't really understand what they're reading. It's a big thing in my family when someone has memorized the Quran - parties are thrown, gifts are shared etc. but no-one really cares about if the person actually understood any of it. It's just memorization.
I read the Quran when I was younger and even memorized half of it but I couldn't tell you what any of it meant until I got my hands on a version that hand Arabic and English translations side by side. That was considered 'cheating' back in the day so my parents and the local Imam were really disappointed I had to resort to finding an English translation version.
This is one of the great dangers of preachers/Imams etc. They ask a child to read some text and then tell the child what the text is saying rather than let the child figure it out themselves. What doesn't help is that most religious texts are kinda ambiguous - if you're a pacifist you can read one sentence a certain way and think, "OK, that sounds entirely reasonable. I should look to help others" whereas a maniac would read the exact same words and come to the conclusion, "God is telling me to kill infidels".
Incidentally, it was after reading the English translations that I moved away from religion.
regulations? chapter 11 and 7 for student loans will push the banks to make the schools fix it!
Ummm, Gutenberg would not have helped most people read the Bible if someone had not translated it into the vernacular. While it is true that Gutenberg allowed for vernacular Bibles to become wildly available, the Roman Catholic Church had a history of opposing such translations long before the advent of Gutenberg's printing press. This was a result of the fact that those who promoted translation into the vernacular did so because they believed that some of the Roman Catholic Church's teaching were contradicted by the Bible.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
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.
This whole "teachers get the summer off as a paid vacation" is a fallacy. Most teachers are paid for woking X days; where I live they can get the check only during the school year or spread over 12 months; even so teh summers are spent prepping for the next year. Anyone could have the same deal if their company offers an unpaid sabbatical leave of 3 months. They don't get overtime if the have to stay late for an event or a parent insists on their conference be held after normal working hours. As for benefits, they are average at best in my district. Yes, they are one of the few jobs that still offers defined benefit pensions, but even then the county messes with them by giving bonuses in lieu of pay raises so they don't get included in pension calculations.
Yes, there are bad teachers; and benefits vary greatly by state; but at the rate we are going the only people who will teach are those who can't do anything else or coaches.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Are they still talking about arming teachers?
Yes, but they won't be allowed to carry around politicians or administrators. Parent / teacher conferences, however, will be a lot more cordial when the teacher is openly packing a loaded .45 in a shoulder holster.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Because this nice table convincingly shows, that the per-pupil spending in America's public schools has quadrupled since 1960ies (inflation-adjusted).
There is amply enough money being spent. We are just doing it wrong [TM].
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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.
It's a myth that you can solve problems in education by just giving schools more money. It's not the amount of money that schools have, it's how they spend the money they have.
Spending more money doesn't improve quality.
https://www.americanexperiment...
Schools actually spend more on minority students than white students
https://www.brookings.edu/blog...
The GAO has something to say:
https://www.gao.gov/products/G...
Even NPR came to the conclusion that simply adding more money doesn't neccasarily help:
https://www.npr.org/sections/e...
"Money alone does not guarantee success any more than a lack of it guarantees failure. Paul Reville, the former Massachusetts education secretary, says not all districts there were able to translate funding increases into academic gains. Often, the difference was how they spent the extra money."
by John Taylor Gatto: https://archive.org/details/Th...
From the summary:
John Taylor Gatto is a former New York public schoolteacher who taught for thirty years and won multiple awards for his teaching. However, constant harassment by unhelpful administrations plus his own frustrations with what he came to realize were the inherent systemic deficiencies of our `public' schools led him to resign; he now is a school-choice activist who writes and speaks against our compulsory, government-run school system.
THE UNDERGROUND HISTORY OF AMERICAN EDUCATION is a freewheeling investigation into the real - as opposed to the `official' - history of schooling, focused on the U.S. but with examinations of other historical examples for the purposes of comparing and contrasting, as well as for tracing where ideas and concepts related to education originated. You will discover things you were never told in the official version, things that will, at times, surprise, disgust, and scare you. You will also be introduced to the little-known historiography of the the darker side of the construction of compulsory government schooling.
In the final analysis, Gatto believes that compulsory, government-run schooling is inherently destructive to true education, the cultivation of self-reliance, and indeed to individualism - which used to be a defining element of the American character. The true purpose of our public school system in reality has more to do with control than it does with learning. This does not mean that rank-and-file teachers, principals, and even superintendents believe they are making students dumber, more conformist, less self-reliant, less capable of genuine analytical, independent thought, and more easily controlled; most people involved in the system no doubt believe that they are trying their best to really teach their students. However, the system itself (which Gatto often characterizes as a complex web) ensures that its real purpose is served, despite the efforts of individual reformers within it - that true democracy is rendered unworkable even as the trappings of democracy are allegedly bolstered. Seen in this light, these institutions that produce barely literate, dependent, conformist, incomplete individuals full of emotional and psychological problems, who lack real knowledge (and whose capacity for acquiring such is deliberately weakened or eliminated), and who are just `educated' enough to pay their taxes and buy the latest products, are not, in fact, failing schools - on the contrary, if we are to believe Gatto's analysis, they are performing their designated function PERFECTLY. That purpose is to mold people in such a way as to make them more easily controlled by corporations and the state (a clear-cut example of how, contrary to popular myth, the interests of big business and those of big government more often than not coincide.)
Though the organization of the book is somewhat haphazard, this book is compulsively readable to any critical thinker with an open mind to consider what's REALLY wrong with our school system (and, no, it's nothing so simple as a shortage of funds or a lack of `accountability' -- the real problems are deeper, philosophical, and systemic.) The book is absolutely riveting, and the country would be better off if more citizens read it and demanded real change to the system.
Gatto's book deserves five stars because it dares to speak the truth.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Why doesn't the state just self publish the damn books for $1 a piece?
Because a large percent of the population wants small governments. Adding a publishing house to state government is the opposite of that.
Has k-12 reading, writing and math really changed that much in that last 100 years?
Yes, yes it has. It has changed dramatically over that time. We also need to teach other subjects now. You might have heard of these newfangled computers, and this thing called the internet. 100 year old books are not sufficient to teach them.
Why are we paying text book publishers?
See previous answer.
I got awesome stuff from the early 1900s. Latin readers, geometry etc.Those books were heads and shoulders above the text books I had in school.
And I got awesome scifi and fantasy books, which were also head and shoulders above the text books I had in school. It doesn't mean that mine or yours were sufficient to replace the textbooks, since they were on different topics than what's being taught in school.
Look, I hate the publishing industry, as it's anti-consumer, hostile, and insanely greedy. But to pretend that we can teach school out of even 30 year old books is ridiculous. You also don't seem to understand the scope of education. You can't purchase enough textbooks for a half million students at the thrift store. Education continuously evolves, generally for the better. If you're not familiar with the expectations we currently have for K-12 education, you might want to look into that. You're going to be very surprised about how different it is from what you remember in school.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
The reason we have a teacher shortage and a glut of awful teachers is precisely because teaching currently isn't rewarded based on performance: a profession that rewards people based on tenure is utterly unattractive to above average workers in that profession.
So: get rid of the crappy teachers, reward performance, and the teacher shortage will resolve itself.
Well no...
The US Taxes for education highly, but their functional spend (as in teacher pay + actual school supplies) is nowhere near the same $. Instead each town has it's own school board, staff, etc. which all need to get paid to justify their (frankly massively redundant and useless) jobs. Plus lots of other useless and overpaid work being done. Lots and LOTS of useless babysitting. Plenty of corruption and graft.
If the amount paid went directly to educating students we wouldn't have problems and teachers could be the highly paid people they deserve to be.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
If you want to solve that problem, don't just look at the teachers and school supplies. The problem is at the administrative level.