[quote]Nyballer31 wrote:
jsbrook wrote:
Mick28 wrote:
jsbrook wrote:
Mick28 wrote:
Excellent post.
And the teachers union is dead set against the voucher system because they know what would happen to the decaying public school system if that happened.
Agreed. The voucher system is a bad educational policy.
Hey Junior you agree with me and then in the next sentence you state the opposite…I don’t think that’s what your Professor meant when he said you should be able to argue both sides of an issue…
Schools need money.
Let’s rephrase that SHCOOLS WASTE MONEY.
SOME schools waste money. Some schools have none to waste. There are shools where students SHARE textbooks 3 to a book. (By the way, such schools do not have art, music, and wood shop classes like you were complaining of above. Of that I assure you.) Throwing money blindly at poor schools will not solve the problems. But some schools simply don’t have the funds for students to prosper no matter how smart they were, and even early intevention and trying to foster a culture of education where parents read to kids and stress the importance of education would not fix that.
The Federal Government spends 600 billion dollars per year on our schools and thats not enough. Thats the whole problem with any Socialist type of programs the money is never enough. You think its bad now well if you nationalize healthcare it will be the same thing the more money you put into it the less you get out of it.
Look at your check right now if your a middle class worker makeing 50,000 a year your probably seeing 40-50 percent of your check gone every week after Fed,state,local,socialsecurity,medicare taxes are being taken out.If we keep this up with our politicians spending money like it grows on trees were going to see 60-70percent of our checks gone every week in the future.There is no other way to fund these type of programs.
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I’m not saying that I want more federal money spent on education. But I don’t want less. I want it utilized better. There are currently a lot of problems with guidelines for use of federal funding and problems generally with the federal/state/city relationship in regard to education. Too many to list here. But one problem is that the government picks inappropriate and irrelevant measures of success in many cases. If schools don’t satisfy some arbitrary benchmarks, mandatory remedies are required under law. And the government doesn’t pay for most of these. In some cases, this has resulted in schools spending twice as much as it’s receiving in federal funds to fix problems that don’t exist in the first place.
Another problem is allocation of federal funding. Federal funding only accounts for about 9% of education funding, with state and local government putting up the rest. Rich school districts don’t really need federal funding at all. But they get it.
I went to a great high school. Property taxes were high. It had plenty of money going to it. It still got federal funding. But it didn’t really need it. It was a very small percentage of overall funding and made no difference in how the school operated.
This kind of stuff adds up. All across the country, thousands of very well-funded schools receive small amounts of federal funds they really don’t need. This adds up to millions that could instead be allocated to impoverished schools that really do need it and are very poorly funded by state and local government.