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Education Funding, why so low? Educational Crisis in US

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by qtlaw, Apr 1, 2018.

  1. qtlaw

    qtlaw Well-Known Member

    Growing up in the 70's education funding was far from idyllic, but there was money for bus rides on field trips and cars for drivers' training. Nowadays? People refuse to even pay for hot lunch services. As a Baby Boomer, its horrendous and I ask my fellow citizens, how is this acceptable?

    Oklahoma Teachers Prepare For Walkout As Red State Revolt Spreads | HuffPost

    Teachers are paid awful wages. Its the clearest sign of the income disparity in our country. Look at where the kids of those who shop at Nordstrom vs. those who shop at Walmart and look at the differential in class sizes, class resources, and teacher pay.

    You can talk about school voucher system all you want but its just another regressive tax. What is a poor person going to do with a voucher worth the last $10,000 when they can't pay the remaining $4k?

    The school systems that Boomers experienced are no longer around. Why? Because people refused to pay attention and now the communities are suffering.
     
  2. Inky_Wretch

    Inky_Wretch Well-Known Member

    Old people vote. Old people don’t have kids. They’d rather have the money for dinner at Luby’s than pay an extra $10 per month for public schools.
     
    exmediahack likes this.
  3. outofplace

    outofplace Well-Known Member

    Teachers and administrators have been targets of both parties for years. I live in New York, but close enough to New Jersey that I got a pretty good read on the approaches of Andrew Cuomo and Chris Christie. One bit of common ground between them was the disdain they showed for educators.

    Inky's post points out a big part of the problem. Both parties know they can shit on public educators without taking a big political hit. Cuomo claimed he was the only advocate students in New York have, claiming that teachers and administrators only care about collecting their paychecks. He also rushed the implementation of Common Core Standards, which created huge problems, then failed to acknowledge his mistake when the backlash from parents became too much to bear. Christie was no better.

    One of the worst things politicians continue to do to public education in this country is constantly changing directions. Common Core and the related testing were both rushed into place, but the state testing changed again within a couple of years and the New York State Education Department adopted Next Generation Standards in September last year, only seven years after it approved the move to Common Core. This constant shifting of standards, evaluations and methods are the worst thing you can do to students. Consistency is important for students. Education should be focused on reaching goals. Those goals should be a set of skills and a base of knowledge the student needs before going off to college or entering the workplace. The job of teachers and administrators is to help them reach those goals, but that's damn difficult to do when politicians keep moving the target without giving the last plan time to work.
     
  4. qtlaw

    qtlaw Well-Known Member

    How hard is it to say "we should invest in our kids; all kids"?
     
  5. PCLoadLetter

    PCLoadLetter Well-Known Member

    It's easy to say. Our governor says it all the time... as he proposes a 1% pay raise for our teachers, who are among the worst-paid in the country.
     
  6. Neutral Corner

    Neutral Corner Well-Known Member

    Old people didn't cut the Oklahoma education budget by 40%. That's happened in a lot of states with GOP held legislatures. Their tax cuts which lead to budget cuts lead to education, which should be protected being cut instead.

    Another big issue is a nationwide campaign to cut teacher retirement benefits. Kentucky first did not fund teacher retirement properly for years and got behind financially, then tried to cut those benefits for people who had worked for many years to earn them. They could not get that through the lege... until they attached it to a last minute uncontroversial sewer bill and sneaked it through. As a result they've got a teacher strike building.

    The Koch Brothers have put a lot of money into killing teacher retirement across the country. Wall Street is all in favor of doing away with group administered retirement plans, because a single entity managing billions can squeeze the fees down to a minimum. They would much prefer to turn it into 401k's, individually, so they can get a higher percentage off of all the members instead of a savvy negotiator minimizing the fees.

    Kentucky Schools Close As Teachers Protest GOP-Passed Pension Overhaul
     
  7. Twirling Time

    Twirling Time Well-Known Member

    I’d say 75% of elected officials in Oklahoma don’t give a shit that public school teachers are on strike. They’d actually rather have all the kids go to church school.
     
  8. tapintoamerica

    tapintoamerica Well-Known Member

    Because republicans hate education. They know that the more education a person receives, the less likely that person is to vote for their selfish, greedy ideas and people.
    Wide Gender Gap, Growing Educational Divide in Voters’ Party Identification

    Record share of college graduates align with Democrats. Voters who have completed college make up a third of all registered voters. And a majority of all voters with at least a four-year college degree (58%) now identify as Democrats or lean Democratic, the highest share dating back to 1992. Just 36% affiliate with the Republican Party or lean toward the GOP. The much larger group of voters who do not have a four-year degree is more evenly divided in partisan affiliation. And voters with no college experience have been moving toward the GOP: 47% identify with or lean toward the Republican Party, up from 42% in 2014.
     
  9. tapintoamerica

    tapintoamerica Well-Known Member

    "Church school" is one of the great oxymorons of our time when applied to secondary education in a place like Oklahoma.
     
  10. BitterYoungMatador2

    BitterYoungMatador2 Well-Known Member

    Same thing happened in Pennsylvania, where a Republican administration both changed the multiplier to give retirees more and told school districts during the late 90s .com economic boom to not worry about kicking in because their invests were covering the contribution amount. Now the bar tab is coming due and there's the usual crap about belt tightening and shared sacrafice.
     
  11. Donny in his element

    Donny in his element Well-Known Member

    LongTimeListener likes this.
  12. Neutral Corner

    Neutral Corner Well-Known Member

    What really pisses me off about that crap is that some poor soul works for twenty or thirty years with the expectation that the pension they were promised will provide them security after they retire, then some jackasses in the lege decides that they can't afford it and change the deal. It's not like the employee can get their twenty or thirty years of employment back. Any number of people working government jobs accept lower wages than the private sector offers in exchange for that retirement security, and doing that to them is one of the rawest screw jobs in government.
     
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