scaredI 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.
Product, sum, but not remainder of the public school system, here.
March 10 2011, 18:14:23 UTC 6 years ago
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
Re: Product, sum, but not remainder of the public school system, here.
March 11 2011, 04:26:12 UTC 6 years ago