Seanan McGuire (seanan_mcguire) wrote,
Seanan McGuire
seanan_mcguire

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Poverty, schools, and the right to education.

What's happening in Wisconsin right now scares the hell out of me.

I won't pretend to have an absolutely perfect view of the political situation; most of the information I'm getting is either from Internet news articles (which slant very pro-union, pro-education, and pro-not being total assholes) or from people who are actually in Wisconsin. But from where I'm sitting, it looks like the new Governor of the state took a budget surplus, turned it into a budget deficit by granting tax breaks to corporations and extremely rich people, and is now trying to take the balance out of the public school system. And maybe succeeding.

I keep hearing the phrase "personal responsibility" being thrown around in discussions of Why This Is The Right Thing To Do. We need lower government spending, including lower educational spending, and if you don't like it, that's what private schools and home schooling were invented for. Um. Okay. You know who doesn't have much personal responsibility? A kindergartner. When I was in kindergarten, my idea of "personal responsibility" pretty much began and ended with remembering to leave room for lunch in my schoolbag, which was otherwise packed with My Little Ponies. I wasn't very consistent about this. Does that mean I shouldn't have been allowed to go to a decent school?

Little kids don't know rich from poor. They don't learn racism, or sexism, or religious intolerance until we teach it to them. They just know that when they go to school, they want the teacher to be fun to learn from, the crayons in the art cabinet to be unbroken, and the library to have books worth reading. They want to learn. Bad schools beat that desire out of them, and underfunded schools, unfortunately, often turn into bad schools. Not because the teachers don't care. Not because the parents don't care. Because the resources aren't there to do anything more than just get by.

I grew up in California, so far below the poverty level that sometimes, there was no heat in our apartment. We moved at least once a year, because that was what the eviction notices required, and every time we moved, we wound up somewhere smaller, and uglier, and scarier than the place before. And through it all? Through it all, I went to great schools. I attended Sequoia Middle School, a magnet school for college prep kids. It was Nerd Prep, and I loved it there. I took Drama and Art and Computers, and I got the exact same classes as the kids whose parents made six figures a year. I attended College Park High School, the college prep high school, and I took Drama and Ceramics and Art and AP English, and I learned.

Did I get picked on for being poor? Yeah. My clothes were old and often ugly, my haircuts were unfashionable, when my glasses got broken, I glued them back together and wore them for another year. But I got to learn. I had access to teachers and books and librarians who knew what they were doing. If I had been forced into an underfunded school with teachers who had to work a second job at night to keep their own heat on (and teachers are already pretty poorly paid, especially when you consider that they're educators, role models, mentors, impromptu counselors, and half a dozen other things besides), that wouldn't have happened, and the person I am today wouldn't be here.

People like me cannot exist if we stop prioritizing universal access to good schools, good teachers, and classes that do more than force every student through the same cookie cutter curriculum—something that becomes necessary when you have more than thirty students to a teacher. If we start making education a matter of "personal responsibility," then we're really saying that poor children should have one more disadvantage added to the heaping tower of things already stacked against them. Not every parent can home school. Not every smart child can afford tuition, or be the one to win the scholarship. Not every child has choices.

My tax dollars fund schools. If I were allowed to decide where my tax dollars went, all the dollars currently funding guns would fund schools. But I don't get to do that, so all I can do is hope that people who benefited from our public school system, or have ever known anyone who benefited from our public school system, will say "You know what? I don't need another tax break on my five billion dollars a year. Let's buy some desks."

What's happening to the Wisconsin school system is wrong. And I'm terrified that it's going to work, and the people who think it's a good idea will start trying to do it everywhere else in the country. Children don't need personal responsibility.

Children need to learn.
Tags: contemplation, cranky blonde is cranky, don't be dumb
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Word^19 billion. If my mother were alive to see this, she'd be pretty much incandescent with rage.

The fight to defund public schools, the fight to attach public teachers---these things are class war, plain and simple. Those supporting it are trying to take away equality of opportunity at a very basic level. And it's not like we were doing such a terrific job of providing it before.

We'd already priced college out of too many people's reach; are we now going to do the same for a basic education?
Looks like it. It scares the living shit out of me.

ladymondegreen

6 years ago

mariadkins

6 years ago

seanan_mcguire

6 years ago

mariadkins

6 years ago

mrs_norris_mous

6 years ago

seanan_mcguire

6 years ago

Not every parent can homeschool.

And, as-you-know-bob, this includes even parents who have the time and resources, but not the ability. If I tried to home-school my kid, who is an extrovert, I would go. Stark. Raving. Crazy. It's a last-ditch choice, yes, but thus far? The schools, the public schools, have been lovely. She's in Special Ed now, and they've got people following her around and teaching her the organizational skills that she needs (so hopefully she won't have to have people following her around in high school)... and considering my organizational skills (ah-hahahahahah!)? I might well not be able to teach her that.

I. Don't. Have. The. Ability. To teach my kid everything she NEEDS to know.

We're over here in New Hampshire, and our schools already fight for funding. (To the point where the school administrators are calling doughnuts-and-coffee meetings to try to get grassroots support, explaining what their budget is, and what they want it to be, and what programs are being cut if they don't get $XX,XXX or even $X,XXX next year.) The state lottery is supposed to go "towards education," but the state government decided, "Hey! Look! Money! Okay, we'll budget what we think education should be, and take that out of the state lottery pot, and everything else from it will go into "general funds."

Dratsabs.

And somehow, most of the schools manage to be decent. *sigh*
The "lottery money is for schools HA HA NO IT ISN'T" routine pisses me off like whoa.

archangelbeth

6 years ago

dornbeast

6 years ago

archangelbeth

6 years ago

Deleted comment

archangelbeth

6 years ago

Deleted comment

Right there with you in your anger. I have been close to tears all morning because what they're doing in Wisconsin and Michigan (which is even more obscene if that's possible but hasn't been getting the press that Wisconsin has) and Ohio - the mid-west where I grew up and still live - is killing the country I know. In Michigan they want to be able to appoint an emergency financial manager who could not only over-rule school boards - not just in terms of the money but on the curriculum and dissolve entire towns! Seriously.

I'm afraid of what will happen next in Wisconsin. Given what Gov Walker did last night, anything is possible.
If Governor Scott Walker, and his minions the Fitzgerald Brothers, and their father the head of the State Patrol were all in the desert dying of thirst and I found them, I would not spit on them as it might give them the strength to crawl to water.

And as a former resident of New Jersey, it goes double for Chris Christie, who has been trying to do what Walker is doing, and getting it up one side and down the other from the unions, including the police union.

I am hoping the soon-to-be-filed suit in Wisconsin, to invalidate the steaming turd that was just passed due to violations of state law regarding the passing of laws, gets it tossed out just in time for the recalls to start going through.

Walker's what my late Grandmother used to call a 'perfect corpse man' - he's so repellent that the worms won't eat him in the grave.

kengr

6 years ago

vixyish

6 years ago

mephron

6 years ago

seanan_mcguire

6 years ago

qnofhrt

6 years ago

deire

6 years ago

ladytinyhelm

6 years ago

deire

6 years ago

In an effort to look at the silver lining: The Wisconsin GOP is bungling its maneuvers so badly and so blatantly that this might end up being the sort of wake-up call people have been waiting for (well...at least in Wisconsin). Recall efforts for every eligible Republican senator, recall for Walker, once he's eligible in November, massive new interest and energy in the Union-movement and civic participation in general.

...and the vote they took last night may very well have been illegal, so there's that.

So yeah, things are crappy and likely to get crappier...but I like to think of it as finally lancing the boil of crazy that's been building up: messy, ugly, but ultimately improved. Of course, if I don't think like that, _I_ go crazy. :-)
I hope SO HARD that you are right about that.

seanan_mcguire

6 years ago

gorgeousgary

6 years ago

Amen.

I went to some badly underfunded schools that, fortunately, had some excellent and dedicated teachers. I was lucky.

I have many, many, many rants about this.

I work at a state university. We're looking at a 20% tuition increase. We're pricing poor kids out of university educations. It makes me sick to my stomach.
I hear you. I keep wanting to grab the Tennessee General Assembly by the lapels and shake them while screaming, "What part of PUBLIC LAND GRAND INSTITUTION are you failing to understand?!"

firynze

6 years ago

menoreiel

6 years ago

seanan_mcguire

6 years ago

Well said, and thank you for saying it.

Washington has a Democratic governor, and a good one, I think, and even so, there have been huge cuts and tuition increases at the universities (not that I'm attributing them entirely to the governor; there are a lot of different factors involved). It terrifies me to think of what things would look like if the Republican who ran last time had won.
It terrifies me that anyone, Democrat, Republican, or Jedi, could think doing this to the schools makes sense.

deire

6 years ago

seanan_mcguire

6 years ago

jane_dark

6 years ago

I've never understood why education is so undervalued by certain sectors of the population. I suspect it's more public education, and that certain folks don't care because they pay to send their kids to private schools.

I'm not a parent and never will be, but I'd rather forgo any tax breaks and put that money towards the school system. Where I live in Maryland, the public schools aren't that great and need all the help they can get.

Just when I think things are getting better something like this comes along. Makes it hard not to be pessimistic.
Indeed! I'm not a parent either, but a well-educated public benefits *everyone*.

Poorly educated kids grow up into adults who lack critical thinking skills. Adults who can't think well enough to discern when they're being lied to, or pay attention to facts more complicated than sound bites.

That's what I see happening. You have a poorly educated populace, you have an unthinking mass that the liars can easily have their way with.

archangelbeth

6 years ago

jenjen4280

6 years ago

tollers

6 years ago

dornbeast

6 years ago

tollers

6 years ago

What is happening there downright scares me. It isn't only the schools... most all public services that will be affected including health care. I really hope that the takeover attempt by the Governor will be overturned in the courts. Spending more money in the future is not the way to fix the problems now, and not educating, feeding, and providing health care for your poorest citizens will cause more to be spent in the future.

I am just thankful for the integrity shown by the 14 state senators that left the state to prevent a quorum and slow the process of takeover.
As am I. That shows real dedication to not being railroaded into doing something you know is WRONG.
Say on, sistah.

I did go to a private school because both my parents worked their asses off, my mother to the point of losing her health over it. My school had good teachers and better resources than some, but it still worked hard to get the students what they needed.

I look at public schools these days and fear that my son won't be able to get a good education because the resources simply are not there. More and more children every year, and fewer and fewer resources to teach them.

It's scary out there.
Semy of Pearls - If that's your cat in your icon/avatar/whatever-the-picture-is-called, he/she is a dead ringer for my cat, Agamemnon. Aggie is the same color tabby and clocks in at 21 lbs. Yes, he's a bit chunky, but also, he's a big cat in general.

semy_of_pearls

6 years ago

jenjen4280

6 years ago

seanan_mcguire

6 years ago

They've *already* started trying elsewhere. According to various reports they have similar measures in the legislatures of a number of other states.

This is what the Tea Party folks got elected for. They want to bust unions (remember the governor of Wisconsin said as much when he thought he was talking to a big money contributor). And they want to break things like public schools.

Yeah, I heard about that. I am praying we can stop them now.

Deleted comment

I've been hearing about a lot of the school walkouts from my friend who is a high school librarian in Wisconsin. I am amazed by the integrity of your high schoolers, even as your state tries to fuck them and their futures.

This HAS to get better.

Deleted comment

Yes, let's create an even larger gap between the haves and have-nots by denying the poor an education. Because, you know, taking away options for public education and only leaving options for costly private education to people who already live paycheck-to-paycheck, if they're even THAT well off, is the same as denying their children an education.

Yes.

It is.

That's what makes this so insidiously horrible.
It terrifies and infuriates me too.

The people involved keep demonizing unions, talking about a "victory" against unions. Hello? Unions are the reason you have a 40-hour work week, and a lunch break, and a minimum wage, and OSHA.

I can't recall the source now, but one of the facts going around in the debate was the correlation between states that allow collective bargaining for teachers and ranking in student test scores. Surprise: the few states that don't allow it? Are at rock bottom on the list.

And why, why aren't more people asking about the "personal responsibility" of the politicians that got us into the financial mess???
The people involved keep demonizing unions, talking about a "victory" against unions. Hello? Unions are the reason you have a 40-hour work week, and a lunch break, and a minimum wage, and OSHA.

And overtime, and..

Every time I hear people screaming about "Teh evil that is de unionz" I think two words: "Triangle Fire."


I can't recall the source now, but one of I the facts going around in the debate was the correlation between states that allow collective bargaining for teachers and ranking in student test scores. Surprise: the few states that don't allow it? Are at rock bottom on the list.


It's probably posted a bunch of places, but I think I saw it via Steven Harper Pizik's blog.

qnofhrt

6 years ago

seanan_mcguire

6 years ago

*rageflail*

They talk about "personal responsibility" and "pulling oneself up by his/her bootstraps," and then they do everything in their power to ensure the poor cannot be upwardly mobile. They're cultivating ignorance. It's abhorrent.
Yeah, they are.

This country really does want people like me not to exist anymore, and that makes me angry.
I'm often in favor of smaller government, but only when government actually needs to get out of the way. NOT the case here. *SO* not.

What murks up the issue is that sometimes the TP'ers seem to have valid points. The trouble lies in separating the wheat from the chaff. I'm not seeing much interest in doing so -- but I'm not just far away from Wisconsin, I'm in the godsbedamned Washington DC FedroSplat. The perspective we often get, not only from the news but from the incessant stream of political ads, is so oddly skewed that I've lost track of the number of dimensions in which we're out of line with everywhere else.

My own perspective on public schools is that we need to fund them adequately and we need to fund them INTELLIGENTLY... too often it seems we're wasting public money. There are 25 high schools in my county, all of whom get the same basic funding per capita. Some variation in quality can be expected of course, but there's a MUCH wider variation than the expected sigma value.

Where I went to high school, school districts are more localized. When I was in HS, I was in a Catholic school. The public high school in my district was quite good, though. The next high school north of there, and the next high school northeast of there, were also quite good. The next high school east of my school district? Sucked. The next high school southeast of my district? Sucked EVEN MORE. And yet the per capita funding was roughly the same.

My parents never complained about the taxes they paid for the schools -- despite their kids all going to Catholic school, so they weren't getting much direct bang for their buck. But they saw that their tax dollars were being spent well. If we had lived in the suckful school districts? Their reaction would have been MUCH different. (I hear about it from them now.)

I'm not saying that you are wrong; I happen to think that we need to make better public education a priority. Since I started school, too often I have seen that it's not *enough* of a priority -- even when the funding is there, too often the quality doesn't reflect it, and nobody seems to hold anyone accountable for that.

But you *have* to have enough funding to make it all work to start with. And that's a point that a lot of folks (though not your readers!) seem to be ignoring.
The occasional valid point is a lot of the problem. When there's one true thing in a mass of lies, you can't say "it's all lies," or you'll get called on the carpet. And that fucks it all up.

I agree that we need to fund intelligently. That does, as you say, require having the money to start funding WITH.
I agree wholeheartedly. I rally don't like what's happening in Wisconsin, and in my current home state of Ohio. The problem is, I don't know how to fight back.
Another enraged and helpless-feeling Ohioan, here.

seanan_mcguire

6 years ago

muddlewait

6 years ago

My mom is a public school nurse in New Jersey. She's lucky that she's a full time employee with a teacher's contract -public school nurses in other states don't always get that and don't get me started on the private schools and how they get away with murder in that regard.

She will be the first to tell you that she loves her union for her benefit package (the only way a widowed mom was able to insure 4 children) and the first to tell you that there are problems with the union. But breaking the unions like this, instead of promoting union and school REFORM is only going to hurt everyone.

I'll be putting my kids (when i have them) in parochial school and paying through the nose for the privilege because I want them to have an integrated religious and secular education. But the people they will someday be sharing the working world with deserve to have quality public education. Hell, the children they'll be playing with on the municipal playgrounds deserve it! My tax dollars deserve to be spent responsibly. I crave a high standard of public education, because it produces better Americans who might just get us out of the mess we've dug ourselves into.
That's sort of the thing. I think you should be allowed to educate your kids however you want to (and I'm really glad you already know what your educational path is going to be!). But as you say, we need ALL Americans to be educated, if we're going to build a better tomorrow for all of us.
I watched it happen with Reagan - there's the save point you have to go back to to find a time when this approach wasn't prevalent.

The countries that made education a priority? Are the ones we're importing people from to do jobs in this country. Are where we are sending work from this country to be done.

I would consider it a national security level priority, but that's just me. I'm used to being considered an eccentric idiot for not being a Republican by now. Really really.
It's insane.
I grew up as one of three kids. My dad worked as a schoolteacher in the public school system; we didn't realize how bad we had it because we had it good. Everyone got to have music and art units. Sure, the music was slightly funded by the parents that had kids in the program. Sure, sometimes the crayons had to be split across kids, and sometimes we had to reuse textbooks that had been used by five years of kids previous to ours. Each teacher told us to get book covers for the books -- 'make 'em last', she or he said. You got to sign your name in the front of the book, so you knew whose book you had. Materials weren't as scarce then as they were now -- you didn't see teachers supplementing school supplies out of their own wallets.

Public schooling produced three very bright kids. My sister, brother, and I all placed into the best high schools in the city -- you had to take a citywide exam to get in, and again? Those schools were public. I never had to pay a cent for my education outside of school supplies and the occasional school trip (most of which were also subsidized by the school).

There were Catholic schools in the city, too. The private kind where you had to pay money to go there. Wear uniforms, too. We didn't see much of the kids from the private schools, even though St. Matthias was just down the road from our public school.

And then I went to college. Holy heck did it cost a lot of money.... but one of the things I won with my public education was a minor scholarship that paid for textbooks at least.

My father was one of the more well respected teachers in the school system. He taught English, Math, History, Mechanical Drafting, and Phys. Ed in one of the specialized public high schools. I used to run into other teachers who knew him. It made me want to be a teacher.

But he couldn't send us to college on a schoolteacher's salary. So he worked a second job as a locksmith over the summer, and eventually turned his background into a mechanical drafting job as an aerospace engineer.

Today? I've got a decent job. Pays enough to keep the rent paid and the power going, even in the overexpensive California area. I have friends who work in the educational field, and they say that it's really hard with the low pay that they get and the lack of resources to provide a good education for their oversized classes. One of them said that he got paid slightly more if he took extra kids above the recommended limit, but it wasn't enough to hire another teacher on -- and he turned it down. As it was, he had to work a second job and rent a place with two other people just to keep himself living in the area and doing what he loved.

His second job? He worked in a magic shop. And he brought that love of mystifying and imparting a sense of wonder to young minds.

Teachers are not the problem -- they're doing their jobs. The politicians who can't do their jobs are the ones who need an education.

-Trav
I grew up poor, and will be poor for as long as I'm still somewhat dependent on my parents. I got lucky. I had a horrible high school, but I went to a magnet middle school in a different state which also had AIG (Gifted) classes, so I had a good start in classes. Middle school provided a foundation that's helped me here in college, although high school most decidedly did not.

I'm also lucky enough to have attracted the attention of an elite university willing to give me about $48,000 a year in grants, leaving me with just about $2000 in loans (or work, can't forget that, although I have yet to get summer work that will pay for the year, and I have other bills, like textbooks, to pay during the semester).

Just seeing how terrible my high school was, and watching 1/3 of each class drop out, and another I-don't-know-how-many students deliberately get suspended over and over again because they hated school...I don't want to know what schools will look like if these precedents ARE set and the people get their way who don't want taxes to pay for public schooling.

My parents certainly couldn't have home-schooled me. My mother stopped being able to help me with homework in 8th grade.
My mother stopped being able to help me with my homework in the 6th. She was a good woman and she tried hard, but yeah. Sometimes, the resources we have at home are not enough. That's why we need the schools.
Very well said. I wish we could get more people to listen.
So do I.
Agreed.

Is this the country they really want? That's the part that blows my mind.
I suspect that most of them don't care - they think they can gather enough money to themselves that if they can't find a competent doctor (just as an example) in the United States, they'll be able to go somewhere else to find one.

I could be wrong, of course.

lysystratae

6 years ago

seanan_mcguire

6 years ago

Another product of a public school education. Heck, I even was one of those few who used both the gifted-talented services and special ed., which meant that I was probably getting more funds than the average student. I got a leg up because my father was a university professor, but my mother's working class -- only one of her siblings finished college, though my mother put herself through a year for an associate's degree and, later, nurse's aide certification. My dad expected all of us to be educated because he was, my mother expected it of us because she wasn't. (Which was the same reason she didn't want me homeschooled -- she didn't think she could teach a gifted kid, and she didn't think Dad had the time with his job. Add in two younger siblings who would throw a holy shitfit if one of us would get to stay home from school...)

Heck, public schools payed for a lot of the help that made myself and my brother -- both on the autistic spectrum -- a lot more functional than we were. My mother would bend over backward for us -- for all of us -- and did a lot of reading on he subject when Ben was diagnosed, but she can't exactly intervene in school testing to note that 'hey, Ben processes these kinds of questions better'. Especially my brother: he's high-functioning autistic, but that mostly means he's in the 'normal' range of verbal communication.

Add in that in general, I think public schools were adopted because they are a lynchpin for democracy. If you don't know things like history and critical thinking and reading/writing, then you can't make an informed choice on a ballot. The 'will of the people' only works if the people know what candidates match to what ideas. It's one reason that I think every American can and should care about K-12 schooling.
Add in that in general, I think public schools were adopted because they are a lynchpin for democracy. If you don't know things like history and critical thinking and reading/writing, then you can't make an informed choice on a ballot. The 'will of the people' only works if the people know what candidates match to what ideas. It's one reason that I think every American can and should care about K-12 schooling.

Yes. This.
Well said! Thanks for sharing your experiences and how they've shaped your perspective. Here's to unbroken crayons and unbroken schools!
Word.
I grew up on my grandmother's social security and food stamps. But she made sure I went to a good school. Her mother paid the tuition necessary for me to attend school "in town" - we lived out in the county. The high school I graduated from in 1987 is one of the higher ranked schools in our nation, and I received a great education throughout that system.

What's happening to the Wisconsin school system is wrong

Amen.
It makes me sad and angry all at once.

mariadkins

6 years ago

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