But then you do not have a dumb, uneducated mass you can manipulate with propaganda and placate with media.
“They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want: They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. Thats against their interests. Thats right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table to figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.”
-George Carlin
Part of the trouble is patience and time.
When people look at problems like this, all they can understand is … give them $1,000 and I want to see the school instantly become a great place that is pumping out Einsteins and rocket scientists by next week.
Very few people understand it as an investment for the future.
It’s a lot like the old proverb or saying …
“Blessed is he who plants trees under whose shade he will never sit.”
When solving big societal problems, we have to be willing to work at fixing things, making them better and solving problems with the understanding that chances are, we will never see the benefits but future generations will.
Our ancestors everywhere and in every culture and race did the same for us. We need to do the same for our descendants.
Yes but, won’t somebody please think of the short term shareholder profits!!
Yes, but in the roots you should also put “less profit for multi billionaires”
Which us really what makes the tree grow.
Funny thing about that. They have multiple studies that show if they’d just pay everyone a thriving wage, they’d be even richer than they are. These studies have been coming out since the '70s. I can only draw the conclusion that the “high score” they are shooting for isn’t their bank account/ net worth but is, in fact, a body count in the most literal of ways. The cruelty is the point.
It’s not enough for everyone to win, they want complete power and immunity
It’s all about financial relativism. They don’t care about the sheer number they have, they care that their number is so many orders of magnitude higher than almost everyone else. Giving everyone a living wage would increase their net worth, but not by more than those who would be getting a payrise, and that’s an insufferable thought for them.
They have so much money that the amount they have is basically an abstract concept, so they’re only interested in their relative wealth rather than absolute wealth. No billionaire thinks “once I have $100b I can finally buy a country I want!”, they think “once I have $100b I can finally use it to make $200b!”. The numbers are abstract and arbitrary because they don’t actually want to spend any of that money.
Ban charter/private/religious K-12. Rich and poor need to be in the same public ed boat and fight for it instead of having an escape hatch for complainers and the wealthy. Oh and have it be distributed per student state wide.
Charter schools are a trojan horse by the owner class to siphon what little is left of public ed funding into their pockets, after they already cut their own taxes starving public over and over to break it. Some charter schools may be “non-profit,” but they all hire publically traded, for profit charter management companies. It’s just another vector for their grift. They don’t care, they bribed state governments to cut their taxes to starve public education, their kids don’t go there, and they’d rather not pay for the pre-literate work force they benefit and profit from. Their kids go to private schools so they never learn to empathize with human beings who aren’t wealthy when they grow up to exploit them. This is a core rot in this country, our owner class is segregated from their fellow Americans from birth by design. We’re basically a foreign, impoverished country to them.
If every child, special populations excluded, were forced by law to attend public schools, and the funding were spread so that poor kid districts and rich kid districts got the same funding per kid state wide, you’d see funding and quality shoot up so fast your head would spin. Teaching would become a LUCRATIVE profession if the wealthy kids of every district were mixed in to every school.
Won’t happen, this country is a corpse being picked clean, but if the people weren’t deluded into worshipping their greedy, sociopathic oppressors as benevolent job creators, we could turn it around by making it an American problem instead of yet another poor American problem, and making Americans with means and time take ownership instead of using their power to make it worse to line their pockets as they have for half a century.
Instead, our national argument is whether poor kids in school deserve to EAT. What a garbage country.
For better or worse, George’s specials, books, and albums raised me from a single digit age in lieu of my abusive parent.
Additionally, school districts are largely fractured so that the rich don’t pay for poor schools.
I have a hard time with that argument against charter schools. If I’d been entirely reliant on the public school system rather than the amazing charter elementary school I went to, I probably would’ve failed on repeat. It gave me a chance to have a small class that saved me from my anxiety. To boot, the school has a focus on sustainability education, something you’d never see in public school that have to straddle a political line with their curriculum.
It’s a lovely dream to say “everything public :D” but it’s not realistic. We need to take 100 other steps around education and in the mean time charter schools should be pretty fuckin low priority.
But that’s just it, its academic segregation. If it is all about “me” then we aren’t a society and should stop pretending it is. If our society actually gave shit 1 about even equity of opportunity at any level, primary school should be of similar quality for all, or if anything, superior education should go to those from the most socio-economically disadvantaged families.
As it is, just as with our economy, it becomes a snowball effect. One kid with white collar parents gets them into a Charter school so that kid has Food and Shelter Security, superior schools, parents who have time to help etc, while public school kid in a bad district has food shelter and insecurity, bad schools, and parents who couldn’t have done anything with 2 jobs each in poverty.
That isn’t a society, it’s just a scam to make a permanent underclass. That kid would have to be a naturally motivated, gifted individual to overcome that, and the vast majority of people are not.
We need to increase the quality of our main education system, not allow escape for a few to better schools and saying fuck the poorest ones more specifically. You got extra opportunity, so you should see better than most how unfair it is to others.
It’s not a lovely dream, many other nations have better public education systems. We just CHOOSE to prioritize the enrichment of private shareholders over having a robust social framework that prioritizes education in more than words. Social supports aren’t a lovely dream, they exist in societies where those that succeed most are correctly taxed to pay back into the society that FACILITATED their great rise to wealth in the first place.
Oh and where I live, we have a charter chain called “Challenger Schools” That advertises teaching conservative principles, so I don’t see the difference in curriculums as a positive.
Thanks for outlining the 100 other steps I mentioned as what should take priority over tearing down charter schools that are often the only option for kids who live in bumfuck nowhere. Oh wait no, they could get driven an hour out of the way to the public school instead by parents who definitely have that time (fat fucking /S).
I’m not arguing against bettering public schools. I’m arguing that we have many other focuses over the many very good public charters. We should aim to match them with public schools. I also see the difference in curriculum as a failure of public schools that needs improvement and not a flaw of charter schools. Rather have a few critical thinkers getting the ball rolling on change than none at all while the public school system continues to crumble.
Side note: literally never seen a public charter that supports “conservative values”. They’re always private because they want to keep the “wrong people” out. Fuck all private schools.
OH COOME OOON!!!
Oh he’s doing the thing with the fingers rubbing together that means taxes
The purpose of underfunded Public Education next to high quality Private Education is to make sure that the scions of the upper middle class and upper class inherit their parent’s priviledges without having to compete with more capable people who were born amonsgt the 90% of the population who aren’t upper middle and upper class.
The reason why the upper middle class and the upper class don’t end Public Education altogether is that they would be poorer in a nation were most people did not have the necessary Education (think: unable to read and write) to work with the higher productivity devices of present day (countries were most people can’t even read or write are invariably dirt poor).
So the Public Schools train for free the children of the 90% to make them capable to do low paid work in a Developed Nation whilst the higher quality Private Schools serve as gatekeepers to most high pay positions, using as selection criteria the wealth of the pupil’s parents rather than the scholastic ability of the actual pupil.
It’s not by chance that Neoliberals the world over, whilst claiming they want a free and competitive market, are always in favour of more Private Education and less Public Education - it’s not about free and unbounded competition in all markets (including the job market) but rather the opposite: it’s about making sure the highly capables children who happen to have been born in less well off families cannot compete with their own children in the job market.
The seed is paying teachers more, and it gets watered with support from administrators and the soil is better safety nets for parents.
thats exactly why they won’t
Yeah but we have to wait at least 15 years to see that start paying off, so it’s not worth it.
-The government
The underlying issue is not teacher pay, but rather the number of teachers available to support pupils at a ratio that allows pupils to learn and engage with material they need to know.
Now the answer to how to get more teachers and smaller classrooms, paying teachers more to encourage more people working as teachers is reasonable. But hardly the one thing that will fix everything with magic.
Students need more engagement time with their teachers and a class of 30-40 would never allow that during a lesson
Also, we need “some children left behind”. Some real problematic children destroying the learning opertunties of others. Wife is an elementary teacher and would have one, maybe two, tier 3 students (most difficult behaviors) and now will have three to five in a class.
Well, with more teachers they could afford to give individual students the help they need, rather than shoving them all into a class despite being at different levels.
My wife recently stopped being a teacher, and it was because her school lost more and more teachers due to low pay, which caused them to put more and more students into her classroom at a time. That, combined with the low pay, caused her to leave, which then made things harder for the remaining teachers who didn’t leave.
It’s a downward spiral that could just as easily become an upward spiral if we just gave them more money; more money gives current teachers an incentive to stay, and gives new teachers an incentive to come in, allowing for smaller class sizes and further removing stressors. Sure, there’s probably more we could do, but if we haven’t even been able to take step 1, talking about steps 2+ seems hasty.
What if I told you that the people ruining public education WANT a reduction in all of that tree’s fruits because then it justifies their belief that the government is broken.
Everyone pretends they don’t pay teachers because ‘it isn’t the market rate’, the real truth is they don’t want any good teachers or the social benefits that result.
They want to be king shit in a pile of rubble, it has always been their way.
"In order to pay teachers more we need more funding, to secure more funding we need higher test scores, to get higher test scores we need to pay teachers more.
Fact of the matter is the local Private School belongs to Goldwater Institute who are lobbying to end public schools and we’re unable to fight back, completely at their mercy."
No pay them the same and expect them to answer their phones and emails like they’re on call 24/7 with the added bonus that they have to lead lives cleaner and holier than any religious or political figure
The schools can do this very easily. The middle school and high school I went to have public finances. The government gives them about $55 million each year (they previously complained that they weren’t getting enough for some reason despite the amount they had being nowhere close to how low what they spent is) and spend about $20 million each year.
Schools are absolutely guilty of underpaying teachers and overpaying admin. Many probably mismanage their funds to some degree. And a lot spend way too much on sports stadiums and other things they probably could do without.
But don’t forget, they also have to shell out tens of millions of dollars all at once when their infrastructure needs to be fixed or updated. If the student population grows, they may be on the hook to build entire hallways full of classrooms and the necessary technology for each room. Usually they sock money away knowing that things have limited lifespans. Even still, many unplanned expenses and planned updates have to wait due to lack of funding.
Which the government will pay for when needed, and they already have debt from that happening anyway. Why can’t they use the unused money for something else? Couldn’t they do that instead of needing constant fundraising and scammy practices regarding charging students too much? $35 million each year is not a small amount that can just go unused.
Yeah but the young are all going to be sent to die in the upcoming wars, so why bother?
