Poverty, schools, and the right to education.

So very well said.

May I link? Like, all over the place?

I can't tell you how much I thank you for this. I had a similar sounding childhood, and I KNOW school saved me.

*nod*

My parents were dirt poor artists living in Brooklyn, NY. I was born three months early in 1979 and they discovered I had cerebral palsy and other problems when I was a baby. Thanks to state programs, I was able to get the medical and therapeutic care I desperately needed. The public elementary school I was enrolled in had special programs for disabled children. I owe a lot to unions, state programs, and people doing their jobs to help kids learn.

You went to Sequoia? I went there in 1980-81.

Yes. And to call this attack on public education short-sighted is a massive understatement. If only the children of the affluent can get a decent education, this country will be that much poorer for it.

I've been looking at the Wisconsin events, and the Republican proposals for the federal budget, and what's happening in my own state.

I am deathly afraid we're selling the future of the United States for nothing. Worse, it might be that we're selling it to the people who make millions because they want to make money.

I hope I'm wrong - I want to be so wrong so badly it hurts. And I don't have any personal stake in the future the way some people do - they have nieces, nephews, sons or daughters to care about. I don't have any of that. I just want a future for everybody.

Even in a bloodless pure-dollars-and-cents analysis, a high-quality kindergarten teacher is worth about $320,000 a year. That’s the present value of the additional money that a full class of students can expect to earn over their careers, without even factoring in all the side benefits like better health and less crime. Education is a good investment.

Good grief. I went to public school way back when and got a good education. I have forgotten almost all the facts and names but the ability to think is still mine.

I am bad I don't stay on top of the political news. Day to day living takes up most of my limited resources. I have been thinking more along the lines of the Great Depression for our current country wide financial problems. I now understand it is heading more towards the French Revolution mind set and has been for years. I just hope it will turn around before the killing starts.

Those who are entering public school teaching as a profession are either saints or fools. My wife has taught elementary school in Ohio for 35 years; I still cannot believe the burdens placed on her time that have nothing to do with teaching; the stress of dealing with unruly children and no tools to enforce discipline; the uncaring parents who won't show up for conferences; the out-of-pocket expenses to provide things the school won't ($1500-2000 per year); the salary that is twenty to thirty percent below comparable jobs in the private sector; the No-Child-Left-Behind insanity that expects developmentally disabled children to progress at the same rate as their normal peers; the legislature's changes to State Teachers Retirement that will fix the annual maximum inflation adjustment at a non-compounded two percent or less (watch what happens to the retirement check when inflation returns to early '80s levels); and Governor Kasich's plan to bust the public employee unions, which appears to be succeeding despite substantial protests at the statehouse by teachers, firefighters, police, and others. I'm really glad that we will probably be on the next plane of existence by the time this nation reaps the fruits of what they are now sowing. Although we have no children who will inherit this mess, I still grieve for the diminished future that faces the children my wife has committed so much of herself to aiding.

As a elementary school teacher here in Canada one of my heroes right now is Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. Over the last few weeks he is absolutely championing the cause and importance of teachers in society. His mother was/is an elementary school teacher and he has been going after the teacher nay-sayers with a withering vehemence that only someone who has watched first-hand how hard teachers work can have.

Go, Jon Stewart. May you help Wisconsin teachers the way you helped 9/11 firefighters before Christmas.

And yet, with all of the verbal support, and protests, the Wisconsin and Ohio legislatures, feeling they have their mandate by virtue of having gotten into office, are going their merry way with the bit between their teeth.

We are being asked by our local union to vote upon and accept a union contract that bites, because we anticipate that after the new legislation is voted upon next week, we would get even less. There is no guarantee that our school board will accept the vote now. All they have to do is wait us out, and then implement whatever they want in terms of working conditions, hours, duties, planning time, ...whatever...all we can say after this new legislation passes is "yay" or "nay" regarding how little money we're willing to accept from them.

i totally agree. i'm thinking about getting certifications to teach high school english and now i'm hearing all this crap about salary cuts and how 50,000 a year is SOOOOO much money, government workers need to sacrifice too, etc. personally, i would kill to make that much money a year (i earn about a third of that). i'm scared about it too, you are so right, no one is thinking of the children when they say budget cut.

Did you see the fabulous compare/contrast on the Daily Show regarding the Fox News pundits and how teachers at $50k are greedy and don't deserve it, but the CEOs on Wall Street who got bailed out by the public totally earned those multi-million payouts and bonuses? It's good TV. The people who most need to see it will miss the point, but it's good.

I hate that the zeitgeist seems to be that bullying and gouging the vulnerable are the way to make society go. Walker makes me ill. Physically ill.

Children can't read guns. People can't eat guns. Unless "we" want Egypt to eventually happen here, I don't see why the military has the lion's share while others have maybe enough to live.

Because you say it so excellently well, linked. Thank you.

If you would like an overview of the entire situation, you may want to watch the Rachel Maddow Show tonight. If you don't have the station, that's OK - the show drops at about 10 PM Pacific as a podcast. Considering the stuff going on right now is right in Dr. Maddow's field, she's got some very good stuff to say about it. I'm expecting tonight's to be interesting based on the summary on Twitter: "Tonight's TRMS is a Special Report on state-level GOP politics "going nuclear"."

"Personal responsibility" is a great excuse to justify why people are suffering. It's incredibly useful if you've got multiple houses and an expensive car or three and a yacht and a private jet; it keeps you from thinking about why people are poor, and it keeps you from having to take responsibility for your fellow human beings.

The really hilarious (aka frustrating) thing is that so many of these people call themselves Christians, and wrap their "anti-big-government" agendas in religious justifications.

I live in Wisconsin and I look at my brilliant, wonderful daughter and worry about what kind of education she's going to get. She's smart and clever (and 1.5 years old) and I'm terrified that our little town's school district is going to fall apart and she'll end up hating learning.

It's interesting that our governor dropped out of college. Since he didn't appreciate education or see the need for it to make a six-figure salary, apparently it's not something that the rest of us deserve.

Agreed. The only reason my grandmother and I were in any kind of a comfortable situation was because of the Social Security money I got for being an orphan, and she *had* a decent, steady job. I owe the government for the fact that I had a "normal" childhood, for the public education which gave me the tools to get as far as college, and for the loans that got me through that. Yeah, my tax money? They can have it with my thanks!

(Not to mention the fire department, police department, law system, working utilities, and all the other things that *every* person here takes advantage of that we owe to the government...)

America has apparently become a reality show called The Biggest Asshole. I'm guessing the final physical challenge involves the last competitor's escape in a private helicopter with All The Money before the starving masses reach him.

I just wish Obama would say something. ANYthing.

Thanks for speaking out about this. You choose your battles well.

I very much agree, and it's not just in Wisconsin that we've got a problem, though it is an extreme example, and one I hope doesn't gain momentum. I'm currently working as a tech for a Community College here in California, and I refer to the budget we have to work with as a "dental floss" budget - we can't even afford shoestrings. From the records I've seen, our supplies budget has remained at the same dollar amount for more than a decade as costs have gone up and programs have increased. With the current proposals for the state budget, it's only going to get worse, too. We're fortunate in that we can get some level of supplies by donations from local biotech and other companies, but it's pretty dicey overall. And I have to resist the urge to hurt someone every time I hear the phrase "do more with less."

The impression I have from growing up here is that there's a generation of Californians who benefited from inexpensive public educations, but who aren't willing to pay the cost of providing that same education to the next generation. It irritates me a great deal, and I really don't understand the mindset that considers education a lower priority than prisons - but then, I'm from a family of teachers and have a social circle where many of them have become teachers of one sort or another.

Apologies for the over commenting yesterday. I seem to need to stay away from talking on the Internet till I chill out. Sure sign one erred: Waking at 6AM with the conviction one should have kept one's mouth shut a bit more.

Too much of how life works depends on where you start, and education is theoretically supposed to be the great leveler there. The American dream and all that rot. Rise up from anywhere to become anything, right?

And we're supposed to do this without fine educators HOW?

I continue to believe one of the great injustices of this country is what a freaking crapshoot it is what kind of schooling you will get if you're poor. I weirdly lucked on out that score: I had the bad fortune to be a military brat in a time when bloody near all of us were on various forms of welfare (family and military stipends meant we always more or less had what we basically needed, at least when I was a child, but I learned to be afraid of telephones and the mailman and I tend to assume when someone tells me they "got something important in the mail" that somebody just threatened to sue them), but I had the good fortune to be coded with a very detailed IEP, which meant that the government would ONLY station my father at a base that had a school system they thought was sufficient to meet my needs and their standards, actually, were pretty high. Some of them were better than others, none the less, but on the average I think I lucked out, because the good ones were more than good enough to give me a foundation to take on the bad ones. I've met so, so, so many bright wonderful people who weren't that lucky, and fighting past a hard past is a LOT HARDER when you don't have some kind of foundation, no matter how "lifetime movie of the week" romantic the story otherwise sounds.

There are points where I think the education system needs reform. It occasionally causes me to butt heads with people I otherwise agree with, but there it is: I think special education needs serious work, having gotten dragged through it since I was seven. I'm not sure the tenure system and "last in first out" is the best idea in all cases (though don't ask me how we should otherwise rate teachers: I have no ideas that I honestly think would work.) I would never, ever argue that cutting the unions out is the Way To Go (I'm in general strongly pro union, because I tend to assume companies and governments behave rationally. That is not a compliment: It means I assume they'll screw you over if it's efficient and they think they can get away with it, and usually given the power disparity between them and their basic line employees, they CAN) Certainly this overheated blaming rhetoric and "teachers are greedy" stuff needs to be called what it is, which is bullshit. I know tons of people I went ot law school with who thought "this is an easy way to get very rich!" (they happen, sadly, to be wrong, but there it is.) I don't know ANYONE who went into education thinking that way, though some of them did find the benefits package appealing. Who can blame them? The pay's not as good as these people could command in the private sector--something has to be there. You can't ask them to make endless sacrifices and have their own children suffer for the love of teaching yours.

I got as far as I have because I had just enough excellent teachers who really, really, REALLY gave a damn--enough to work with me even when I was not so very easy to work--to keep me bobbing along. I don't *want* teaching to be the field you go into when you can't go anywhere else. I want teachers to be the very BEST. I want them to FIGHT to be teachers, and I don't mean fighting because their funding's been gutted and their classrooms overstuffed.