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School Choice is Good For America; round 4


Muda69

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5 hours ago, DanteEstonia said:

When your only option is a private school, as the case is in Bedford, you don't have a choice.

Then maybe those individuals should move from Bedford to somewhere else where there are choices.

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Crackpot School Board Californicates History: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/crackpot-school-board-californicates-history-san-francisco/

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By now you will have heard of the San Francisco Board of Education’s decision to rename 44 schools in the city, to scrub them of anything that might offend the woke. They went after people from Abraham Lincoln and Paul Revere down to Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic former mayor of the city and California’s senior senator. The board did not consult historians to verify the claims of racial offense they imputed to various historical figures; indeed, it has emerged that in some cases, the board’s conclusions were factually wrong.

Isaac Chotiner of the New Yorker interviewed school board president Gabriela Lopez, 28, about the renaming. I urge you to read the interview, because it reveals how mindless and fanatical these progressives are. Lopez cannot explain why they did what they did. Her answers are filled with empty social justice cant.

 

You’re talking about the learning of history and its importance. Did the committee want historians to testify? And why or why not?

So, it’s hard for me to answer that question without just pointing to [committee statements that] “they did not want to include historians.” I think that that’s not the process that they created. They included a diverse set of community members, people with a set of experiences that contribute to these discussions, people from different backgrounds who are also educated in their own rights. So I think that was the makeup of the committee.

One member of the committee said, about talking to historians, “What would be the point? History is written and documented pretty well across the board. And so we don’t need to belabor history in that regard. We’re not debating that. There’s no point in debating history in that regard. Either it happened or it didn’t.” What do you think of that?

I think I’m trying to understand your question, then. Are you thinking then there’s no allowing for there to be that process?

You were talking earlier about how, no matter whom we uplift, history needs to be taught. Since you’re highlighting the importance of history, I was curious if historians had testified. And it seems like they hadn’t.

Right. My work is in sharing with students this understanding of our history. I think that for me, it’s important to uplift. This does not cancel history. It’s a moment and an opportunity to uplift things that we normally aren’t uplifting in our public-school system, in our society. And that means other voices, other experiences of diverse community members that would bring pride to our student body, and that would allow for students to learn more about themselves. It’s really moving away from this idea that somehow in the taking away of these names, we’re also taking away the stories, and we’re taking away what happened. We can’t move on without that understanding. We can’t heal as a society without that understanding.

Education as social therapy. Who cares about facts? We need to uplift!

Chotiner presses the point with Lopez, trying to figure out whether she believes that historical truth matters here. He points out that some of the figures whose memory was damned by the board, and whose names will now come off of schools, were actually not guilty of the offenses for which the Board damned them. The exchange goes on with Chotiner trying to pin Lopez down on whether or not truth matters:

 

But that’s not something you’re concerned about?

No. I mean, I wouldn’t phrase it that way, either. I think it would just require more dialogue. I know the committee is still meeting, and they’re still open to that. So it’s not that it’s not a concern. I think it’s something that’s missing without a dialogue.

But the committee member said, essentially, “things are true or false.” And so it seems like if they’re false, then that doesn’t necessarily call for more dialogue; it calls for more accurate history.

I think anyone can agree with that.

Yeah.

So here’s my piece. The real issue is how we are challenged when we talk about racism. And how then the masses come out in order to combat this, when it’s an idea that harms what we’re used to. My current situation is sharing with people very simply that I don’t think it’s appropriate to have symbols of racism and white-supremacy culture. And we’re trying to have this discussion, and what I’ve seen throughout my time on the board, whenever issues like this come out or arise, people need to combat it and try to find any problems around what we’re discussing, because it’s not something that we should be open to having a discussion about. It’s something that people have a lot of issues with.

Word salad! Poor Chotiner labors on, trying to get a straight answer from Lopez:

I’m not quite sure what that means when we are talking about things that did or didn’t happen.

I think what you’re pointing to and what I keep hearing is you’re trying to undermine the work that has been done through this process. And I’m moving away from the idea that it was haphazard.

Ah! Now the interviewer is a villain because he keeps asking Lopez basic questions that she can’t answer.

Read it all.There’s so much more. In an earlier interview, Lopez said that it’s not such a bad thing that San Francisco public school kids haven’t been in school forever, because of Covid:

“They are learning more about their families and their culture spending more time with each other. They’re just having different learning experiences than the ones we currently measure. And the loss is a comparison to a time when we were in a different space.”

Can you imagine being a parent of a San Francisco public school student, and hearing the president of the school board say such a thing? Chotiner asks Lopez about that too. You’ve really got to read it all.

This is a perfect example of the real and lasting damage that the Woke do when they gain control of institutions. This is anti-intellectual mindlessness, but nobody is stopping them. The San Francisco Chronicle published this column by a San Francisco public school teacher who insists that Bernie Sanders’s mittens are an example of “white privilege.” I kid you not. Excerpt:

And there, across all of our news and social media feeds, was Bernie: Bernie memes, Bernie sweatshirts, endless love for Bernie. I puzzled and fumed as an individual as I strove to be my best possible teacher. What did I see? What did I think my students should see? A wealthy, incredibly well-educated and -privileged white man, showing up for perhaps the most important ritual of the decade, in a puffy jacket and huge mittens.

I mean in no way to overstate the parallels. Sen. Sanders is no white supremacist insurrectionist. But he manifests privilege, white privilege, male privilege and class privilege, in ways that my students could see and feel.

“When you see privilege, you know it,” I’d told them weeks before. Yet, when they saw Sen. Bernie Sanders manifesting privilege, when seemingly no one else did, I struggled to explain that disparity. I am beyond puzzled as to why so many are loving the images of Bernie and his gloves. Sweet, yes, the gloves, knit by an educator. So “Bernie.”

Not so sweet? The blindness I see, of so many (Bernie included), to the privileges Bernie represents. I don’t know many poor, or working class, or female, or struggling-to-be-taken-seriously folk who would show up at the inauguration of our 46th president dressed like Bernie. Unless those same folk had privilege. Which they don’t.

This person, Ingrid Seyer-Ochi, actually teaches high school students in San Francisco. Can you imagine the poison she puts into their minds, teaching them to be offended by elderly socialist Bernie Sanders’s racist mittens?

Seriously, this is deranged cultishness. The White Man’s Mittens Menace. Here’s the thing, though: this is not funny when you consider what it means for the future when the woke cult seizes institutions. Joe Biden has named Cindy Marten, superintendent of San Diego’s public school system, as his choice for Deputy Secretary of Education. Last year, Marten welcomed with gushing compliments to a training meeting Bettina Love, a critical race theorist whose program included the claim that public schools “spirit murder” black and brown children.

Christopher Rufo reported further on things that Cindy Marten has overseen in San Diego schools. Excerpts:

According to new whistleblower documents, San Diego Unified held an even more radical training program featuring a speaker who believes American schools are guilty of the “spirit murdering of Black children.” The school district hired Bettina Love, a critical race theorist who believes that children learn better from teachers of the same race, for the keynote address at the August Principal Institute and for an additional district-wide training on how to “challenge the oppressive practices that live within the systems and structures of school organizations.”

Though the school district explicitly forbade attendees from recording the session, one whistleblower took detailed notes of the speech and captured screenshots of the presentation. According to these notes, Love began her presentation by claiming that “racism runs deep” in the United States and that blacks alone “know who America really is.” She argued that public schools in particular “don’t see [blacks] as human,” are guilty of systemic “anti-Blackness,” and “spirit murder babies” in the education system.

The concept of “spirit murder” is at the heart of Love’s teachings. In a recent article in Education Week, Love writes that public schools are guilty of “the spirit murdering of Black and Brown children,” which she defines as “a death that is built on racism and intended to reduce, humiliate, and destroy people of color.” During the presentation in San Diego, Love added that supporting Black Lives Matter is a “cheap symbolic” gesture that will not stop the spirit murder of minority children in schools.

At the end of her presentation, Love told the teachers that whites are directly responsible for the plight of “dark children.” In a slide labeled “Teacher Education Gap,” Love argued that “Whiteness reproduces poverty, failing schools, high unemployment, school closings, and trauma for people of color.” She insisted that “white educators must take responsibility” because they created and derive privileges from “white supremacy culture.”

Declaring that “reform will not work,” Love argues for “abolitionist teaching,” a pedagogy designed to “remove oppression from its roots.” Whites, according to Love, must make a special effort. During the presentation in San Diego, as part of a list of “abolitionist teacher’s demands,” Love told white attendees that they must undergo “antiracist therapy for White educators” in order to overcome their racism, ignorance, and history of harm. Once they have proven themselves, they can become “co-conspirators” in the campaign for “abolition.”

Under Cindy Marten’s exquisitely woke leadership, San Diego schools have abolished requirements to turn in homework on time, because that’s racist:

In the first semester of the 2019-20 school year, the San Diego Unified school district board discovered that 20% of black students had received a D or F grade. In comparison, 7% of white students earned the same failing marks. School officials decided that the 13% racial disparity was a function of systemic racism, requiring an “honest reckoning as a school district.”

In October, that “reckoning” led the San Diego board to vote unanimously to “interrupt these discriminatory grading practices.” Rather than attempt to replicate the factors empowering the 80% of black students who achieved passing grades, the board’s first action to “be an anti-racist school district” was to dumb down the grading system for all. Under the new protocols, all 106,000 San Diego students are no longer required to hand in their homework on time. Moreover, teachers are now prohibited from factoring a student’s classroom behavior when formulating an academic grade.

Now the woke wisdom of San Diego public schools will inform federal education policy at the senior level. This is what it means to have a Democratic president. When creating “antiracist” school systems, and renaming all the schools in California after woke heroes, fails to produce better grades for minorities, there will be even more radical measures tried. Wokeness cannot fail; it can only be failed. The woke live by ideological lies, and demand that the rest of us do too — or else. The Board responsible for overseeing San Francisco public schools has shown that truth does not matter to them, only woke uplift. We must all live by lies, or be denounced as racists.

We can point at the San Francisco school board and laugh at its crackpot antics while pitying what the students and families there are having to endure, but never forget: what happens in California rarely stays in California.

A scary future has been foretold for government primary education across America.  Yet another reason to abolish the entire edifice.

 

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On 2/8/2021 at 10:46 AM, Bonecrusher said:

.

Well, obviously I screwed up when I went to edit my post and hit save too early.

In a nutshell, I was commenting that what the school system is doing is silencing dissent, and is this the direction we want to take on both a local and possibly national level.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Sick Of The Teachers: Time For Reform

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/sick-of-the-teachers-time-for-reform/

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If the nation’s nurses had the same devotion to duty displayed by unionized teachers, the COVID death toll might be twice what it is. The virus crisis has exposed our teachers’ unions for what they are. The United States is far behind almost every other advanced country in returning its children to in-person learning. This presents a political opportunity for serious education reform that is not to be missed. 

The public can now be made to understand the consequences of our destructive education regime. Some 90 percent of college graduates are excluded from the teaching force by absurd education course requirements. There is no discretion at the building level to hire and fire, or to open schools. A single salary schedule creates artificial shortages of teachers in math, science, and special education. And since the use of computers and distance learning was discouraged by state rules and union contracts, schools were left unprepared for the virus crisis.

The public-school establishment and the Biden administration are begging for federal financial relief for computers, ventilation systems, and the like. The urgency of these demands is exaggerated, but any money provided should be doled out over a period of years. Since new money will be involved, the Supreme Court’s Sebelius decision imposes no barriers to attaching new conditions to this new aid. Therefore, four conditions are appropriate:

  1. 1. Each recipient school should have its own building-level board with substantial powers over both personnel and spending, subject to annual audit. On the model of the British Education Act of 1986, some members should be elected by secret ballot by parents and teachers; others should be appointed by local government, including some with skills in accounting and building repairs, or co-opted when members retire. Three- and four-step grievance procedures are unnecessary under this regime, since the building-level board is a check on arbitrary actions by the principal and since there will be dozens of public school employers in each county, not one monopoly employer. This reform would also address the seniority bumping systems, which operate to allocate the most experienced teachers to the schools with fewest problems.
  1. Not more than a single term of education-methods courses should be required of elementary school teachers and none at all of secondary schoolteachers, eliminating the protective tariff that excludes 90 percent of college graduates from the teaching force, and that renders schools vulnerable to illegal strike threats. The market approves this reform; millions of parents spend thousands of dollars a year to send their offspring to private schools and colleges none of whose teachers have been required to spend a day in “methods” courses. The exclusion of educated housewives looking to work after their children are grown is indefensible, as is the exclusion of retired military and law enforcement personnel, who are at loose ends at a relatively early age. Teachers’ colleges (once called “normal schools”) are an early twentieth century invention. The great private school headmaster Horace Taft once described them as places where “Sub-normal students are taught by abnormal teachers.” Most state laws require a year of “methods’” courses for teachers, two years for principals, and three years for superintendents, equivalent to a pre-frontal lobotomy. This explains why most large school districts are administered by a small fraternity of a few hundred doctors of education, who tour the nation, failing upwards, and who frequently award each other lucrative consulting contracts on the way, the subject of more than a few criminal indictments.
  1. Any aid should include extra pay for teachers in STEM disciplines, critical languages, and some branches of special education. The inadequacy of our secondary schools explains the outsourcing to the Far East and South Asia of many scientific and technical jobs, resulting in the disappearance of manufacturers, and the proletarianization of an increasingly semi-skilled work force increasingly composed of hewers of wood and bearers of water in service industries.
  1. Finally, it may be useful to insist upon the complete conversion of the twelfth grade to a voucher system, or its severance from the public school system entirely and its annexation to community colleges, vocational institutions, and the higher education sector. The adolescent culture of our high schools is inappropriate to young adults, many if not most of whom are beyond the compulsory education age. The schools of the Province of Quebec, which some judge to be the best in North America, have annexed the 12th grade to the college system and may serve as a model.

The total effect of these reforms is to break the educationist monopoly in our public schools, frequently composed of the weakest graduates of our weakest colleges. The experience of Great Britain, all the Australian states, and New Zealand in the 1980s suggest that the more drastic reforms outlined above are feasible. Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan made fitful and foredoomed efforts at certification and single-salary reform by offering states discretionary grants, but those efforts were abandoned as soon as he was gone. If, as is likely, the Biden administration resists these reforms, it is at least time to start making them a public and widely discussed issue. 

Vouchers and charter schools involve only tinkering around the edges. What is needed is a regime that makes every school a charter school, and gives every school the administrative advantages of private schools. The credibility of Randi Weingarten—the president of the American Federation of Teachers—and her cohorts has never been lower. The time to strike is now.

Indeed it is.

 

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31 minutes ago, Muda69 said:

Some 90 percent of college graduates are excluded from the teaching force by absurd education course requirements.

Do we allow engineering licenses to be issued without proper course requirements?

31 minutes ago, Muda69 said:

There is no discretion at the building level to hire and fire, or to open schools.

Yes there is, that's what the principal is for. 

32 minutes ago, Muda69 said:

And since the use of computers and distance learning was discouraged by state rules and union contracts, schools were left unprepared for the virus crisis.

Citation needed. I want to see a union contract that discourages the use of computers. 

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44 minutes ago, Muda69 said:

1. Each recipient school should have its own building-level board with substantial powers over both personnel and spending, subject to annual audit. On the model of the British Education Act of 1986, some members should be elected by secret ballot by parents and teachers; others should be appointed by local government, including some with skills in accounting and building repairs, or co-opted when members retire.

CCSD's charter schools are structured like this to an extent. 

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15 minutes ago, DanteEstonia said:

Citation needed. I want to see a union contract that discourages the use of computers. 

https://www.chicagotribune.com/coronavirus/sns-nyt-teacher-unions-resisting-online-demands-20200421-nqpjfzrl3fg2fdp33pnzlve6ni-story.html

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...

Unlike many other college-educated workers, teachers are unaccustomed to spending the day tethered to screens. Many work under meticulously negotiated contracts that detail their work hours, break times, and rules for how they engage with administrators — contracts that now seem all but irrelevant with students and teachers confined to their homes.

As the realities of online education have become starkly apparent, unions are seeking new protections for their members. But they are also trying not to jeopardize the public support they won, including in red states, during massive walkouts in 2018 and 2019 that shut down schools in places like Oklahoma, West Virginia, Los Angeles and Chicago.

Unions in some of America’s largest school districts have called for restrictions on the number of hours and days that teachers would be required to work from home during the pandemic. They have also pushed back against the expectation that teachers conduct lessons live at fixed times, and on the ability of principals to sit in on lessons conducted over Zoom or other video platforms.

...

New York City has seen perhaps the most drastic display of unions pushing back against the new expectations placed on teachers.

By the time remote learning started in the nation’s largest school district in late March, many of the city’s roughly 75,000 teachers were already frustrated with New York’s leaders, who waited longer than those in some other major cities to close public schools. Then, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced that spring break, scheduled to begin in early April, would be canceled for schools across the state. (Many other places did the opposite, keeping or even extending their breaks.)

New York City’s teachers’ union, the United Federation of Teachers, held out hope that educators could still take off for Passover and Good Friday — and was furious when Mayor Bill de Blasio kept them on the job for those religious holidays.

“Never once during this crisis has the mayor thanked you for your service,” the union’s president, Michael Mulgrew, wrote in a scathing email to his members. “Instead, he diminishes your work by describing it only as a vehicle to keep children at home.”

Union officials said they were fighting to make sure New York’s teachers were not forced to work more in a day than the six hours and 20 minutes in their contracts. A politically progressive caucus within the union is calling on its leaders to push for “less academic work” during the coming months, and to lobby for a moratorium on student grades and teacher evaluations.

Other unions have fought for, and won, limits on teacher workloads. In Brevard County, east of Orlando, Florida, the union and district agreed in late March to limit teachers’ instructional time to three hours per day. The district also agreed that it would not require teachers to communicate with families using their personal cellphones, and that it would not formally evaluate teachers’ online instruction.

Earlier this month, a statewide union delivered a petition to Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado asking him to direct superintendents to bargain with local unions on expectations for remote teaching, and to reimburse educators for out-of-pocket expenses related to working online from home.

In Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second largest, the local union has fought aggressively in recent weeks to protect teachers from what it called unreasonable demands on their time, such as long, repetitive remote staff meetings and inflexible schedules. The union and district announced an agreement to limit instruction and student support time to an average of four hours per day per teacher, and to limit staff meetings to one hour per week. Live teaching via video platforms will be encouraged, but not required.

But while unions seek new boundaries for their members, some teachers said they believed this was a moment in which those rules no longer apply.

...

 

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18 minutes ago, DanteEstonia said:

It's also because these subjects are harder to teach, and no one wants to deal with potentially dangerous kids. 

Kids wanting to learn math and science are potentially dangerous?  Are teachers afraid of all the ballpoint pens in the student's pocket protectors?  Of being assaulted with a slide rule?

 

  • Kill me now 2
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School Board Mocks Parents Who Support Reopening: 'They Want Their Babysitters Back'

https://reason.com/2021/02/18/oakley-union-schools-babysitters-reopening-video-meeting/

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A northern California school board discussed ways to limit the public's ability to speak at meetings and mocked parents who desperately want schools to reopen.

"They want their babysitters back," Lisa Brizendine, a trustee of Oakley Union Elementary School District, told her colleagues during a pre-meeting session that they believed was not open to the public.

School board member Kim Beede mentioned a negative interaction with some frustrated parents? a frustrated parent, then described her own mindset: "Bitch, if you are going to call me out, I am going to fuck you up."

Another member of the board theorized that parents want their kids to go back to school so they can spend the day getting high.

The board also discussed whether it would be possible to change the public comment portion of their meetings so that members of the public would be cut off automatically after three minutes of speaking time.

Roughly eight minutes of footage were recorded before the board members realized that they were not alone:

The board did not respond to a local reporter's request for comment. School Superintendent Gregory Hetrick released a public apology.

"I know that our students deserve better from us," said Hetrick. "I pledge to work collaboratively with stakeholders and community members to begin doing the important work that is needed to rebuild community trust in our district."

But Hetrick did not make the offensive comments. The school board members did. Parents have started a petition calling on them to resign.

These are difficult times, and I'm sure it's frustrating to deal with irate parents. But that's the board of education's job. Its members are supposed to be accountable to families, whose tax dollars fund the school system. And parents have every right to call for public school teachers—whose salaries are paid via funds that are forcibly extracted from citizens whether or not these citizens plan to make use of the services—to get back to the work of watching their kids.

Teachers are, in fact, babysitters. They obviously do more than that, but day care is a fairly critical element of their jobs. As Brown University's Emily Oster recently told Reason:

School is serving two roles. It is a child care solution and it is teaching people to learn. At the beginning, it was like: "What do you mean? School is not child care! I'm not a babysitter!"

First of all, I found that a little disrespectful to people. What's wrong with having part of your job be child care? That's a totally reasonable job.

But the other thing is it's not really fair to say to parents: "Can't you take care of your own kid?" You told me I have to put my kid in school eight hours a day! That is literally a law; it is a law that my kid has to be in school. And now you're telling me that the expectation should also be that I am free for all of that time, even though I'm legally required to not have my kid here. So it's odd that we've set up this whole system in which people are required to go to school and then we're going to be, like, "Well, school's not your child care." You told me it has to be!

Kids need to return to school, and the consensus among experts who have studied the data from schools that have reopened is that this can be done safely, with minimal risk. Education officials should be working toward making it a reality as soon as possible, not lashing out at parents who have come rely on a service they pay for.

 

  • Disdain 1
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On 2/18/2021 at 5:53 AM, Muda69 said:

A single salary schedule creates artificial shortages of teachers in math, science, and special education

Allow me to rewrite my response to this: A shortage of math and science teachers exist because the vast majority of people who have degrees in math and science don't want to teach. I have a science endorsement, and methods classes, and I've never been short of work. A shortage of special education teachers exist because it's a potentially dangerous job. I used to teach a homebound student, who was not allowed back in school because he threatened to kill a pregnant teacher. 

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5 hours ago, DanteEstonia said:

 

SHOW ME THE CONTRACT.

This is a Contract: 

https://core-docs.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/asset/uploaded_file/600240/NCCTA_2019-22_Master_Contract.pdf

 

Show me these mythical contracts, not an article. 

So you are calling the authors of the Chicago Tribune article liars?

 

4 hours ago, DanteEstonia said:

Allow me to rewrite my response to this: A shortage of math and science teachers exist because the vast majority of people who have degrees in math and science don't want to teach.

And the reason for this is?

 

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16 hours ago, DanteEstonia said:

https://www.indeed.com/career/chemist/salaries

Schools are funded PER KID. Where is the extra money for a salary differential supposed to come from?

lol,  now you are seeing the failures of government education, and the public sector teacher's unions.  You desire that a government school P.E.  or home economics teacher be paid the exact same amount as a highly educated math or science teacher, or vice versa.  This 'race to the average'  mentality is endemic in socialistic systems like government education.  In a true market based educational system those math and science teachers would be paid a higher salary because their skills are more highly valued in the educational marketplace, with no public sector educational union present to ultimately drive salaries down to some mean or average. 

 

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5 minutes ago, Muda69 said:

You desire that a government school P.E.  or home economics teacher be paid the exact same amount as a highly educated math or science teacher, or vice versa.

Yes I do, because we are all part of the educational process. 

6 minutes ago, Muda69 said:

lol,  now you are seeing the failures of government education, and the public sector teacher's unions. 

No, I just understand basic funding metrics. BTW, when I worked in PHX, they paid me a "hard to hire" stipend for teaching science; it wasn't worth it. 

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19 hours ago, DanteEstonia said:

Yes I do, because we are all part of the educational process.

More socialist claptrap.

19 hours ago, DanteEstonia said:

No, I just understand basic funding metrics. BTW, when I worked in PHX, they paid me a "hard to hire" stipend for teaching science; it wasn't worth it. 

And those 'funding metrics' need to change.  Meaning those who choose to teach those subjects which tend to translate to more in demand/higher paying jobs out in the "real world" should be better compensated.  It's simple economics.

 

 

13 hours ago, DanteEstonia said:

Also, @Muda69 and @swordfish, my personal trainer (born in 1995) didn't know what Watergate was about. Hence, why we pay teacher equally because all subjects are equally needed. 

And you are 100% sure this was the fault of that individual's government school history education?

 

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6 minutes ago, DanteEstonia said:

You will then oversaturate the supply. 

Then prices will go down, and individuals will look for different careers that pay what they want to earn. 

You must not have learned basic free market economics in government school.

 

12 minutes ago, DanteEstonia said:

Social studies isn't part of the Star Rating system we use in Nevada. 

 Sorry, I don't know what the "Star Rating system" is in this context.

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Public Schools Refuse to Open. Give the Taxpayers Their Money Back

https://mises.org/wire/public-schools-refuse-open-give-taxpayers-their-money-back
 

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In many school districts across the nation, public school teachers still don’t want to go back to work. Private sector workers have long been hard at work in kitchens, at construction sites, and in hardware and grocery stores. Meanwhile, from Seattle, to Los Angeles, and to Berkeley, California, Teachers' Union representatives insist they simply can’t be expected to perform the on-site work in the expensive facilities that the taxpayers have long been paying for.

This week, for example, some schoolteachers in Colorado’s Jefferson County turned out to protest the district’s plan to return to limited in-person learning later this month. These protestors still insist it’s unsafe, even though the very institutions these people have long parroted in favor of endless lockdowns—the CDC and the World Health Organization, for instance—say reopening schools should be a “top priority.” Moreover, the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine have concluded “The lower risk of transmission of the virus by younger children and reported milder or moderate illness in this age group suggest the appropriateness of in-person instruction for primary and elementary grades."

But that’s not good enough for public school teachers. So, in many cases, parents who actually want or need to send their students to an in-person school must go to the private sector instead. The government schools in these places can't be bothered, but the private schools are racing to serve the public. 

The most absurd aspect of all this is that even when public schools effectively tell parents and students to "get lost," taxpayers still have to pony up the cash to pay for the public schools. If any private sector industry tried to function this way, it would be denounced in no uncertain terms. But it doesn't happen this way because in the private sector—unlike the public schools—business owners and employees don't get paid if they refuse to work. On other words, the customers can take their money and leave. 

This disconnect between the taxpaying public and the public schools has always existed, of course, but the covid-19 panic has made it far more obvious to the general public. The time has come to finally allow parents and taxpayers to pull their money out of these unresponsive and expensive boondoggles.

Private Schools Are Mostly Back in Business

Compare the public school reaction to that of private schools.

By last fall, it was already apparent that private schools were much more concerned with providing in-person services than were the public schools. As Time reported last August, parents were picking up on the fact that if students were to receive an in-person education, it was probably going to happen at a private school. Moreover, most Catholic schools remain open and offer in-person instruction. In Philadelphia, for example, the archdiocese’s more than a hundred elementary schools have returned to a five-day-per-week schedule. Also, “there’s been no in-school transmission” of covid-19. In Boston, Catholic schools opened while public schools dithered. The local public radio outlet reports:

It’s a stark contrast, one that’s made Catholic schools attractive to families fed up with remote learning and willing to pay for in-person instruction.

The schools’ administrators do not know of a single case of anyone being hospitalized as a result of transmission through these schools.

This is a fairly common experience for Catholic schools. In the archdiocese of Denver, schools were “100 percent open” beginning last fall, and

less than one percent of students and less than four percent of the staff members test positive over the entire fall semester – numbers that are less than overall positivity rate for children and the general population. 

Defenders of the public schools’ lackluster efforts have attempted to explain all this away by claiming private schools are all the well-heeled domain of the wealthy. Many articles point to the tuition rates of boutique schools, like the Germantown Friends school in Pennsylvania, which charges more than $40,000 per year.

This, however, is an outlier. Many private schools charge far less than that. Yes, some Catholic schools—which are 37 percent of all private schools and comprise the largest nonpublic school system in America—are indeed expensive boutique schools run by “private orders.” But most Catholic schools are run-of-the-mill archdiocesan schools that charge under $9,000 per year for high schooling, and even less for elementary school. That may seem like a lot, but it’s well below what many public schools spend on educating each student. Moreover, anyone who is familiar with urban Catholic school knows that these schools hardly cater to the wealthy elites. This is largely because of extensive scholarship programs for lower-income families.

These hapless parents who have been driven to private schooling by the public schools’ Covid shutdowns have to pay twice—once for the public schooling that’s been reduced to Zoom meetings, and once for the actual schooling taking place at private schools. 

What If We Ran Grocery Stores like Public Schools?

The private sector could never get away with this. 

Just imagine, for example, if grocery stores functioned this way and that grocery stores were government-owned institutions. Funding would come from tax revenues and funding levels would be calculated on the assumption that at least 90 percent of consumers would obtain all their groceries through these stores.1 Taxpayers would be charged accordingly. Just as state governments now spend 20 to 40 percent of state budgets on public schools, state governments would budget a sizable portion of the budget to “grocery finance.” Naturally, taxes would be much higher than they are now. Moreover, since taxes would be much higher—and posttax income much lower—countless Americans would indeed shop at these government stores. They would likely do so even if the quality of the food were lower. "Hey, I already paid for it," the thinking would go, "so I might as well shop there." We’d be told these government grocery stores are indispensable. How could the poor buy groceries otherwise? Of course, your shopping list would have to meet the approval of grocery planners so as to fit within the budget. Don't like the menu that the grocers have selected for you? Tough luck. 

Moreover, given the enthusiasm with which public school staff and officials have abandoned their usual work in the face of Covid, it's easy to imagine a scenario in which government grocery services are even more limited in case of a public health scare.

Admittedly, like the schools, these grocery stores would probably not end all their services. They’d likely still allow some limited shopping. No nonemployees would be allowed to enter the stores. As with schoolteachers, these public sector grocery workers would insist that the grocery stores function under numerous restrictions, perhaps with fewer business hours, and even long weekend closures to allow for extensive cleaning. And why not? The staffers and managers will get paid no matter what. 

Yes, there would be some private sector grocery stores for those insist on shopping in person or "after hours." If you want to shop for groceries elsewhere, you’ll just have to pay twice: once for the government stores, and a second time for your “private” groceries.

Grocery Vouchers, a.k.a. “Food Stamps”

Obviously, if presented with the option of a world of fully government-owned grocery stores, many Americans would consider such a thing to be madness. And rightly so. 

Moreover, even when confronted with the question of whether or not low-income people can afford groceries, few advocate for a government takeover of grocery stores. Instead, the taxpayers tolerate funding a system of monthly grocery vouchers for households below a certain income level. These vouchers are commonly called “food stamps.”

Now, many people may take exception to food stamps as a boondoggle. But it’s also hard to deny that if voters and politicians are going to insist that low-income consumers be subsidized, this grocery voucher system is orders of magnitude better than an extensive system of government-owned grocery stores.

Yet why do so many Americans think a system of government-owned schools makes sense?

If the same commonsense thinking that prevents a government takeover of grocery stores were applied to schools, the situation would look very different. Schools would virtually all be private institutions. If a parent doesn’t want to “shop” at a particular school or school district by enrolling his child there, the parent need not spend any money there.

Of course, politicians and many voters would insist that something be done to subsidize education for low-income residents. With this, the less bad strategy is the grocery model: provide the educational version of food stamps for students. These funds aren't tied to any institution or any government districts. They go where the consumers go. 

Meanwhile, so long as public schools continue to receive direct funding from government coffers—with no economic connection to consumer choice—the public schools won't have to care what the public wants or needs. 

 

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