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.
March 11 2011, 12:59:34 UTC 6 years ago
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.
March 15 2011, 03:22:49 UTC 6 years ago
This.
All this.