The Definition of a Moon-Bat

Off Topic Politics & World Issues
121

[quote]nephorm wrote:
knewsom wrote:
Are you trying to tell me that teachers get paid too much??

I never said that. I said you don’t get what you pay for when unions are involved.

I am all for paying teachers more, as long as we can evaluate them and fire them when they suck. Higher salaries, no free rides. Unions don’t like that. They want to have their cake and eat it, too.
[/quote]

One question I have is, is it weird that our budget for defense is so much more than all other sectors of the government combined? Seems to me if we could just allot a little more to education (one days expense in Iraq for example) per year we could really change how education works in this country.

The current model isn’t working. We need to focus more on literacy, math, sciene, and critical thinking skills on the whole. No child left behind is doing just that. Tests are a good tool but that is all they are. We need to be able to make measurements of progress on our students but using them to rate teachers doesn’t work. The reason this is is that all students learn differently and one teachers method may not work for one student compared to the rest of the class. Plus there are a whole other field of parameters involved in the education process that tests cannot always measure. This is something that needs to be identified early on, on a per student basis.

I would also like to see the disparity in teacher pay be resolved. I cannot figure out why teachers in the same state cannot be paid the same rate (based on tenure and lateral duties, etc). Why do we use property tax to justify the quality of education a student will recieve?

For example, there are two high schools that are not more than 5 miles away from each other: one that is in a very affluent suburb and another in a more industrial, blue-collar neighborhood. They both have roughly the same number of students yet the more affluent school has a radio and television station on campus and the other can not even afford new math and science books and has had to shut down the school busses and library? They are both in different counties and therefore fall into different school systems.

(These are the kids of the parents that clean the homes and mow the laws for the parents of the more affluent school kids.)

Is this just my liberal thinking or is it really unfair that the poorer students, who already have a giant hurdle to jump in life, are being disadvantaged by state education policy?

122

[quote]LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
One question I have is, is it weird that our budget for defense is so much more than all other sectors of the government combined? Seems to me if we could just allot a little more to education (one days expense in Iraq for example) per year we could really change how education works in this country.
[/quote]

Education should not be a federal issue. It should be a state issue like it was before the Dept of Education was formed.

Defense spending is about the only thing the fed really needs to do. Everything else is a power trip for the politicians.

So, no - it’s not weird.

123

[quote]rainjack wrote:
LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
One question I have is, is it weird that our budget for defense is so much more than all other sectors of the government combined? Seems to me if we could just allot a little more to education (one days expense in Iraq for example) per year we could really change how education works in this country.

Education should not be a federal issue. It should be a state issue like it was before the Dept of Education was formed.

Defense spending is about the only thing the fed really needs to do. Everything else is a power trip for the politicians.

So, no - it’s not weird.
[/quote]

Then why do they subsidize universities?

Seems to me education would benefit from a little gov’t spending–that way they could enforce standards across all schools and every one would have equal access whch was my complaint.

Unequal access breeds inequality.

124

[quote]rainjack wrote:
LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
One question I have is, is it weird that our budget for defense is so much more than all other sectors of the government combined? Seems to me if we could just allot a little more to education (one days expense in Iraq for example) per year we could really change how education works in this country.

Education should not be a federal issue. It should be a state issue like it was before the Dept of Education was formed.

Defense spending is about the only thing the fed really needs to do. Everything else is a power trip for the politicians.

So, no - it’s not weird.
[/quote]

Rainjack,

This is an admirable post. If only more people would realize that power is a magnet and that these guys are like junkies on a ‘power trip’! When we hand over power to government (such as in the Great Society program), we’re simply handing treasure over to the Vikings, on the tenuous promise that ‘they’ll never come back’.

Yeah…

HH

125

[quote]LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
Then why do they subsidize universities?[/quote]

For the same reason that they subsidize public education - more power.

You don’t get that even with Fed money. Oh they have standards, but there are good schools and shitty schools anyway.

I don’t know what that has to do with anything. There is not unequal access. School used to be about the 3R’s. Now it is more a social experiment than anything else. That’s what breeds inequality - inequality with the rest of the world.

126

I’m with you on this one Lifiticus…

I know plenty of teachers that have ZERO intention of becoming administrators… my mother included. The best teachers teach because its their passion.

I agree that bad teachers need to be fired, but usually, bad teachers don’t MAKE it to tenure (I’m not saying that it doesn’t happen, I’m saying that it’s not the status quo) - sadly, some teachers become bad teachers after aquiring tenure, but then, they’re also the ones who usually become administrators.

The education system here in Cali works fairly well, but is stilly sadly underfunded. I’m more than willing to pay for better salaries for teachers if it’ll encourage them to teach in lower income neighborhoods… There are a few who make a point of doing so regardless of salary (again, my mother), but I think we need to give more incentives to bring greater opportunities to those who have been left behind.

…that’s why I’m an Angelides supporter. :slight_smile:

127

[quote]rainjack wrote:
LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:

Unequal access breeds inequality.

I don’t know what that has to do with anything. There is not unequal access. School used to be about the 3R’s. Not it is more a social experiment than anything else. That’s what breads inequality - inequality with the rest of the world.

[/quote]
States do not appropriate money to schools in a way that makes state sponsored education equal, in my opinion–for the reasons I stated previously which you probably didn’t read.

I don’t know why schools with a higher tax-base get paid more than those in the inner cities and blue-coller suburbs. This is where the problem comes from. Schools are treated differently including the children within those schools.

It seems to me that in an effort to equalize education all schools should recieve the same amount per child. Furthermore, teachers in the same state should also be paid at the same rate based on “time-in”–not what the tax-base allows for.

Education is being marginalized because it is too hands-off. We need to incept standards across the board. Home schooling should not be an option because the schools are so over burdend that they prefer loosing children to being taught at home. We can fund a mighty military but we cannot fund schools? Explain why this is–and why it is right the way we are doing it now.

128

The reason schools are in decline is because powers-that-be assumed that there will always be victims (aka teachers) that will be willing to work under terrible conditions at low pay, to benefit the children. Our leaders relied upon this notion, kind of like Dems always assuming there’s no bottom to the money-pot.

What if they run out of victims? What if fewer and fewer people are willing to suffer to help maintain an evil and corrupt system? That why you see what you are seeing now.

Just as a gang of robbers starves when it runs out of victims, our society is running out of victims. That’s why we have huge deficits and a collapsing educational system. The supply of victims is running out.

HH

129

[quote]Headhunter wrote:
What if they run out of victims?[/quote]

Then there will be plenty of education majors looking for three months off in the summer.

Knewsom: I don’t know where you get the idea that “most” teachers won’t make it to tenure if they aren’t good. I saw a lot of bad teachers who had been teaching an awfully long time.

Teachers’ unions want all of the benefits of professionalism with none of the responsibilities… like competition and standards enforcement.

Everyone bitches about teachers not being paid enough. Noone wants to say that if we’re going to hire all these highly qualified, wonderful teachers, the existing crappy ones must be fired.

If you sat at your desk doing your job half-assed all day, would you have the balls to tell your employer “If you paid me more, I’d be more motivated”?

130

[quote]nephorm wrote:
Headhunter wrote:
What if they run out of victims?

Then there will be plenty of education majors looking for three months off in the summer.

Knewsom: I don’t know where you get the idea that “most” teachers won’t make it to tenure if they aren’t good. I saw a lot of bad teachers who had been teaching an awfully long time.

Teachers’ unions want all of the benefits of professionalism with none of the responsibilities… like competition and standards enforcement.

Everyone bitches about teachers not being paid enough. Noone wants to say that if we’re going to hire all these highly qualified, wonderful teachers, the existing crappy ones must be fired.

If you sat at your desk doing your job half-assed all day, would you have the balls to tell your employer “If you paid me more, I’d be more motivated”?[/quote]

Sorry, Neph, your response ‘escapes’ me. Explain.

Look, when faced by a large, mindless bureaucracy, teachers responded in kind. If you are an individual up against a system that treats you like disposable items, you respond. “Get a dog to eat a dog.”, as the saying goes. I don’t blame teachers for trying to protect themselves. Administrators, bureaucrats, politicians, don’t treat people as people but as pawns. You know that. Its an evil and amoral world. Hobbes was pretty close to the truth.

As long as we lack a morality based upon human nature, its a bestial world, like we have now.

HH

131

[quote]LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
Education is being marginalized because it is too hands-off. We need to incept standards across the board. Home schooling should not be an option because the schools are so over burdend that they prefer loosing children to being taught at home. We can fund a mighty military but we cannot fund schools? Explain why this is–and why it is right the way we are doing it now. [/quote]

I don’t think the way we are running education is the right way. I never did. Home schooling should always be an option. What you seem to fail to realize is, that the taxes paid by the homeschooler do not go away. More money is available for those in public education because of homeschoolers.

Money doesn’t teach kids. My nieces and nephew are homscholled for pennies on the dollar that it costs to teach them in public school. It is that way across the board.

I would privateize the education system and bring in the best tool in the world for efficiency - competition. But the scared ol unions are against it because it would root out the shitty teachers, and take away the sacred cow of tenure.

I would also do away with any subject matter that did not directly involve the 3R’s. I would go old school. You seem to think that everything needs to be discussed. That’s absolute tripe. Until at least grade 8 - kids need to be told what to learn. Discussion is for adults, or for brains that have had enough education crammed in them such that they have a frame of reference from which to speak.

Bring back flunking the dumb kids. Reward the smart ones. Outcome based education is an abysmal failure mainly because feelings and self-image have dick to do with memorizing the multiplication tables.

132

[quote]LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:

I don’t know why schools with a higher tax-base get paid more than those in the inner cities and blue-coller suburbs. This is where the problem comes from. Schools are treated differently including the children within those schools.
[/quote]

The answer is that most states have a system pursuant to which the bulk of school funding comes from locally generated taxes – property taxes, to be specific. Thus, higher property values = higher tax base = more money for those schools.

133

[quote]
Headhunter wrote:
What if they run out of victims?

nephorm wrote:
Then there will be plenty of education majors looking for three months off in the summer.

Knewsom: I don’t know where you get the idea that “most” teachers won’t make it to tenure if they aren’t good. I saw a lot of bad teachers who had been teaching an awfully long time.

Teachers’ unions want all of the benefits of professionalism with none of the responsibilities… like competition and standards enforcement.

Everyone bitches about teachers not being paid enough. Noone wants to say that if we’re going to hire all these highly qualified, wonderful teachers, the existing crappy ones must be fired.

If you sat at your desk doing your job half-assed all day, would you have the balls to tell your employer “If you paid me more, I’d be more motivated”?[/quote]

neph is completely correct.

My wife works for one of the top school districts in the country. She has worked there for two years now.

Her position the past two years was essentially an amalgamation of two part-time positions between two separate schools, which they crafted into one full-time position for her. Each school also had a devoted full-time teacher in her subject area, in which she has a subject-specific masters of education. She teaches two elective subjects: theater (main area) and speech.

At the end of last year, the full-time theater teacher at one of her schools quit. The VP offered the full-time position to my wife. However, the principal flipped out because that was a violation of the union contract - they first needed to offer the position to another teacher who had previously been destaffed (due to the fact he was a bad/unpopular teacher - this teacher killed the previous program this teacher headed when this teacher couldn’t get enough students to sign up for classes after several years). The “offer” to my wife was rescinded, this other teacher accepted, and my wife kept her previous position.

Come the end of this year, amazingly, next year there will not be enough students in the program to justify 1.5 teaching positions next year. Quelle surprise. So my wife was officially “destaffed” and is being moved to a newly created shared position between a new school and the other school at which she has been working the past two years.

Why not get rid of the program killer? Tenure. My wife just had to explain to the kids who asked why they couldn’t get rid of the other teacher that such teacher “had been hired first.”

On another note, my sister in law is also a teacher - an elementary school teacher - who is getting her masters to get into administration.

Unions aren’t the only cause of problems, though they’re large.

Also mentioned above are the administrators, which is a separate issue.

Finally, state-mandated spending programs on things other than education are problematic – and specifically problematic are mandated individually-tailored programs for problem kids, which suck the money away from the majority of the rest of the students.

134

Almost forgot one of my favorite examples of a union-caused problem.

Most teacher contracts allow for unlimited accumulation of sick leave, which is probably a relic from some past age far before most of us started working. No private company that I know of – including private schools - have this. Perhaps its more common among government workers.

At any rate, there are many examples of older teachers who are approaching the age at which they qualify for their retirement – a nice, old-fashioned fixed-benefits pension at around 85% of their full-time salary, btw – who will simply call in sick for months in order to keep pulling their full-time pay. Thus increasing the salary/benefits expense for the school, which also must hire long-term subs to fill those positions, to cover for teachers who are receiving full-time pay. Lovely.

Personally, I don’t get paid for unused sick time at all, and my vacation doesn’t roll over. Not that I’m complaining about salary, but there are many benefits to being on the government’s payroll that don’t come through in the salary numbers (for teachers, vacation time, accrued sick days, fixed-benefit pensions, etc.).

135

[quote]BostonBarrister wrote:
LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:

I don’t know why schools with a higher tax-base get paid more than those in the inner cities and blue-coller suburbs. This is where the problem comes from. Schools are treated differently including the children within those schools.

The answer is that most states have a system pursuant to which the bulk of school funding comes from locally generated taxes – property taxes, to be specific. Thus, higher property values = higher tax base = more money for those schools.[/quote]

I am not rich but I pay higher taxes so my kids can go to a better school system.

There are quite a few blue collar people that do the same in my area.

This is my choice. If they took my tax dollar away from my school system and sent it to another I would be royally pissed off.

I would probably sell my house and move to an area that has lower taxes.

136

[quote]Zap Branigan wrote:
BostonBarrister wrote:
LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:

I don’t know why schools with a higher tax-base get paid more than those in the inner cities and blue-coller suburbs. This is where the problem comes from. Schools are treated differently including the children within those schools.

The answer is that most states have a system pursuant to which the bulk of school funding comes from locally generated taxes – property taxes, to be specific. Thus, higher property values = higher tax base = more money for those schools.

I am not rich but I pay higher taxes so my kids can go to a better school system.

There are quite a few blue collar people that do the same in my area.

This is my choice. If they took my tax dollar away from my school system and sent it to another I would be royally pissed off.

I would probably sell my house and move to an area that has lower taxes.
[/quote]

Welcome to Texas. We have a little thing called “Robin Hood” school financing. It wasruled unconstitutional, but the gyst of it was that if a distrct is “rich” it will have to pay part of its tax revenues to ‘poor’ districts.

Using property taxes to fund public schools is an idiotic idea unless the money is ALL centrally collected in the state, and distributed evenly. But then that smacks of socialism. It is particularly bad in oil rich areas of the state.

We are oil poor, and we barely have a weight room, and grass on the football field, while 100 miles away, in the middle of an oil field, the same size school has an olympic swimming pool, and some of the larger schools even have golf courses.

Finding an equitable way to distribute money for education is a huge problem. But I think takeing as many gov’t employees out of the process as possible will allow for that much more money going straight to the kids.

137

[quote]Headhunter wrote:
Sorry, Neph, your response ‘escapes’ me. Explain.[/quote]

I just meant to say that the problems you see in education affect you because you actually care about teaching. So when you speak of ‘victims,’ you’re really talking about the teachers who give two shits.

The rest, who don’t care about educating or anything beyond their own interests, will still be happy to take government benefits.

138

[quote]BostonBarrister wrote:
Not that I’m complaining about salary, but there are many benefits to being on the government’s payroll that don’t come through in the salary numbers (for teachers, vacation time, accrued sick days, fixed-benefit pensions, etc.).[/quote]

Not so much in other areas in the government. The pension system isn’t very competetive, nor is the salary. It has recently improved for technical workers (engineers, scientists, etc), but really not enough to prefer government over private. The job security is better, though.

139

[quote]Zap Branigan wrote:
This is my choice. If they took my tax dollar away from my school system and sent it to another I would be royally pissed off.

I would probably sell my house and move to an area that has lower taxes.

[/quote]

Hey, life isn’t fair–just ask someone struggling to pay for school and still has to take out loans. I can think of 100 things that I would not want funded with my tax dollars and education is not on that list–take my property taxes and lets share it between all schools in my state (sharing is not an American value is it).

We are the richest nation on the planet yet we cannot figure out the ways and means to educate our children properly. Rich kids get all the benfits and then their parents have the audacity to claim that all it takes is hard work–these are the same parents whose kids will never know hard work a day in their lives.

140

[quote]LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
Zap Branigan wrote:
This is my choice. If they took my tax dollar away from my school system and sent it to another I would be royally pissed off.

I would probably sell my house and move to an area that has lower taxes.

Hey, life isn’t fair–just ask someone struggling to pay for school and still has to take out loans. I can think of 100 things that I would not want funded with my tax dollars and education is not on that list–take my property taxes and lets share it between all schools in my state (sharing is not an American value is it).

We are the richest nation on the planet yet we cannot figure out the ways and means to educate our children properly. Rich kids get all the benfits and then their parents have the audacity to claim that all it takes is hard work–these are the same parents whose kids will never know hard work a day in their lives.[/quote]

Damn right life is not fair.

If you want your kids to go to a better school system save your money and send them to private school or move top an area that pays higher taxes and has a better public school.

Don’t demand someone else foots the bill for you.

My wife and I bust our asses to live in a decent area with good schools. So did our parents.

My kids will do the same thing for their kids.

By shifting funds as you propose we will be hurt, not the small amount of rich kids. They will always be able to afford private school when you strip the decent public schools of their hard won tax doillars and ship them off to be misspent by those that have not earned them.

You advocate bringing people down to the same level. I advocate giving people opportunity to improve the education of their kids.

Why would I live in a high tax area if I don’t get the benefit of sending my kids to a school that gets the money?

Why would anyone?