> "throwing more money at the problem won't fix it"
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<br>> "I blame the system. I blame a system that assumes there is one accepted way to teach every child in this country and one that herds 40 of them into a classroom..."
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<br>> The problems are complicated, and regardless of what you may think, they require more funding. Here goes:
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<br>> The single largest problem in the American Education system is geography. America is enormous, and getting kids to school is a huge cost. This presents a host of problems:
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<br>> * Small towns spend larger percentages of their budget just getting the kids to class compared to large cities. Transportation costs a lot, especially now that the price of gasoline is skyrocketing.
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<br>Ok. Raise land taxes in those areas. If you prefer to be sprawled out, then you prefer to pay more. This shouldn't involve federal funding, because its not a federal problem that people choose to live in the middle of nowhere very far apart from each other.
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<br>> * Small towns seeking identity insist on having their own schools. The result is tons of schools operating independently and inefficiently. For example, Every small town has its own superintendent. This is a highly trained position which requires a big salary in addition to secretaries, payroll officers etc.
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<br>Let those small towns pay for it. "Seeking their identity" isn't a federal problem. If small towns really want that, they should spend their money on it.
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<br>> * Property taxes aren't equal, and local government is in charge of paying a large percentage of their school's costs. Some local governments can't foot the bill and their schools suffer as a result. Some local governments have charitable businesses, and they get all of the money (and all of the best teachers). This is a hit or miss affair.
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<br>Cut the fluff. Do you really need a football team to give kids a quality education? Raise land taxes. Et cetera. I will say this, not all schools are created equal and more than a few I've been to were way too lavish for what I consider "meeting needs".
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<br>> * Special Education. Special education is now dominating school funding. Schools do not get a larger budget based on their special education needs. If you have a higher population of special education kids, the budget comes out of the budget that used to be allocated for the rest of the kids. Districts with high populations of poor / uneducated people have low property taxes and end up spending their tiny budgets on Special Education. First programs to get axed are gifted and talented.
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<br>School should be about education, not charity.
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<br>> * Our economy blows. The first place to get hit when the economy blows is school districts. While operating costs rise (transportation, fuel oil, school supplies etc) city councils repeatedly decide it's time to cut budgets. In the two school districts I've worked at, the town council renigged on their pledge to increase the school budget 5% every year.. and instead cut the budgets. Teachers get laid off when this happens.
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<br>Our economy is kicking ass and taking names. Unemployment is at incredibly low levels - the dollar's value has decreased but that doesn't affect locals *that* much (in some ways it helps them). Inflation hasn't been no where near its worst times. I see hard times in the future, but there's certainly no hard times right now. There might be in the next 2-3 months for construction workers though.
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<br>> * If you can't pay me well, I want job security and I don't want to be stressed out. I make 32,000 a year. If I used my engineering degree I'd be making double. I am highly qualified for my job. I have to put up with kids threatening to sue me because I confiscated their spit-ball gun. I have to tolerate kids threatening to take me to court because I tap them on the shoulder to wake them up. I am sworn at, harassed and threatened on a weekly basis. I have to clean up after kids who throw trash on my floors. I have to cautiously guard all my valuables for fear of them being stolen. That's the bad part. There's a good part which is a whole lot more rewarding and rationales why I do it.
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<br>You're weak and soft, no offense. No, you don't deserve job security if you are bad at what you do. I didn't tell you to accept a job for shitty pay.
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<br>> My point is, I'm one of a very few individuals who can tolerate the bullshit that teachers have to deal with. We've got a nation full of misbehaved parents with misbehaved kids. So this brings up my final and possibly most important problem:
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<br>> * We're overpopulated with dumbasses. Dumbass parents make dumbass kids in larger quantities then their counterparts (the intelligent parents).
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<br>So flunk them, repeatedly. My point about the funding, as an aside, has nothing to do with what you are talking about. There's plenty of money there, its just being poorly spent. Think about how much your school would profit if it sold the land it was using for its football field. To be honest, children may be entitled to an education, but they're not entitled to their own set of free sports teams, $300,000 in coaches & physical education teacher's salaries and an indoor heated swimming pool.
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<br>You also failed to mention the incredible costs of the sheer size of most schools, which I find excessively large and in a stupidly designed way (typically very low to the ground and inefficient in terms of heating). You'd be better served with several, smaller schools, meant to handle less children and not meant to provide them with a full cafeteria and recreation center.
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<br>The money is there, home schoolers don't have olympic size swimming pools, thats why their educations are so cheap. Furthermore, its undeniable that in most education settings in public schools, no college degree whatsoever should be required, which lowers the cost mismatch for teacher salaries considerably.
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