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, 16:40:18 UTC 6 years ago
The goal isn't "small government". It truly isn't. The goal is to privatize the government. They want, if anything, BIGGER government... so long as they can get money from it. It's all about getting profit and money. In DC, this means that there are now a plethora of "Small to medium-sized minority or female-owned* consulting firms which focus on government and military contracts."
A good number of actual civil servants do nothing but manage these contracts. Contractors outnumber government employees; the contractors make a bit more, but are disposable. I could go into more detail but... anyway, that's the goal of these actions; to privatize in order to increase profits. That's tax money which isn't going back to people. It's not more efficient, it's just a way to siphon off money.
It amazes me who and what is now being characterized as overpaid and overfunded. Did these people go to the same schools as I did? The ones where the teachers had to put their own money for teaching supplies? Where we were using 20-year-old books? Hell, I used the same calculus book as my father... because it hadn't been replaced since he took the class. I've seen how teachers live, how much they (aren't) paid. When I was in first grade, I noticed that every teacher was married to a doctor, or a lawyer, or someone else with a high-paying job... because that was the only way they could afford to live on their salary. If a first-grader can figure that out, why can't these people?
* Note that this does not actually mean that the business is truly owned or operated by minorities or women; usually but not invariably this means they found the minimum number of people to put on the Board of Directors to meet requirements for contract vehicles
March 15 2011, 02:14:34 UTC 6 years ago
March 15 2011, 20:38:14 UTC 6 years ago
This is kind of secondary to the question of education... but it's identifying the overall disease. The unfortunate reality is that there are those - not many, but it doesn't take many - who will do anything to make a profit. They're not malicious, they're not immoral - they're amoral, and they don't understand any premises under which what they're doing might be considered "wrong". And we left them in charge of the henhouse.
March 16 2011, 00:33:24 UTC 6 years ago