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Myth: Schools don't have enough money
2006 John Stossel ^ | John Stossel

Posted on 01/18/2006 6:54:15 AM PST by Millee

"Stossel is an idiot who should be fired from ABC and sent back to elementary school to learn journalism." "Stossel is a right-wing extremist ideologue."

The hate mail is coming in to ABC over a TV special I did Friday (1/13). I suggested that public schools had plenty of money but were squandering it, because that's what government monopolies do.

Many such comments came in after the National Education Association (NEA) informed its members about the special and claimed that I have a "documented history of blatant antagonism toward public schools." "Stossel is an idiot who should be fired from ABC and sent back to elementary school to learn journalism." "Stossel is a right-wing extremist ideologue."

Not enough money for education? It's a myth.

The truth is, public schools are rolling in money. If you divide the U.S. Department of Education's figure for total spending on K-12 education by the department's count of K-12 students, it works out to about $10,000 per student.

Think about that! For a class of 25 kids, that's $250,000 per classroom. This doesn't include capital costs. Couldn't you do much better than government schools with $250,000? You could hire several good teachers; I doubt you'd hire many bureaucrats. Government schools, like most monopolies, squander money.

America spends more on schooling than the vast majority of countries that outscore us on the international tests. But the bureaucrats still blame school failure on lack of funds, and demand more money.

In 1985, some of them got their wish. Kansas City, Mo., judge Russell Clark said the city's predominately black schools were not "halfway decent," and he ordered the government to spend billions more. Did the billions improve test scores? Did they hire better teachers, provide better books? Did the students learn anything?

Well, they learned how to waste lots of money.

The bureaucrats renovated school buildings, adding enormous gyms, an Olympic swimming pool, a robotics lab, TV studios, a zoo, a planetarium, and a wildlife sanctuary. They added intense instruction in foreign languages. They spent so much money that when they decided to bring more white kids to the city's schools, they didn't have to resort to busing. Instead, they paid for 120 taxis. Taxis!

What did spending billions more accomplish? The schools got worse. In 2000, five years and $2 billion later, the Kansas City school district failed 11 performance standards and lost its academic accreditation for the first time in the district's history.

A study by two professors at the Hoover Institution a few years ago compared public and Catholic schools in three of New York City's five boroughs. Parochial education outperformed the nation's largest school system "in every instance," they found -- and it did it at less than half the cost per student.

"Everyone has been conned -- you can give public schools all the money in America, and it will not be enough," says Ben Chavis, a former public school principal who now runs the American Indian Charter School in Oakland, Calif. His school spends thousands less per student than Oakland's government-run schools spend.

Chavis saves money by having students help clean the grounds and set up for lunch. "We don't have a full-time janitor," he told me. "We don't have security guards. We don't have computers. We don't have a cafeteria staff." Since Chavis took over four years ago, his school has gone from being among the worst middle schools in Oakland to the one where the kids get the best test scores. "I see my school as a business," he said. "And my students are the shareholders. And the families are the shareholders. I have to provide them with something."


TOPICS: Culture/Society
KEYWORDS: educationfunding; myth; pspl; publicschool; publicschools; stossel
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To: SoftballMominVA
"We expect roads to be paved and smooth, policemen and firemen to respond when we have a need, public parks to be kept to a nice level, our borders kept strong and the children of the community to be educated so that one day they can take our place as the crochety ol' geezer."

If the quality of our public education system even approached the quality of our nation's police and fire departments we wouldn't be debating this topic.

American public schools are inferior, and the product they're turning out is also.
201 posted on 01/20/2006 3:32:57 AM PST by RavenATB (Patton was right...)
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To: Kellis91789

I am all for vouchers, too. Weren't they declared 'illegal'. In a great travesty of justice, once again spewing from the courts.


202 posted on 01/20/2006 5:36:01 AM PST by bboop (Stealth Tutor)
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To: Amelia
I don't think there is anything inherently unconstitutional about states exercising the powers reserved for the states

You forgot, "or the People." Education is the responsibility of the Parents (the People), NOT the State. Education as a function of the State is a Marxist idea imported from Prussia to the US in the 1850s by Horace Mann.

In some areas, they have to be threatened with jail and fines just to get the children to school so that the government can attempt to educate them.

How is this any different from what I propose, which is using the force of the State to require the Parents to provide for the education of their children, in community schools, private schools, or home schools?

Should the children be tested periodically to make sure they're achieving at or above prescribed levels?

We are required by law to submit our children to testing and assessment for progress EVERY YEAR by agents certified by the State. At the beginning of every school year, we must submit a synopsis for each course, curricula and text books used, complete with their tables of contents, for each of our children, some of whom are special needs and ESL students requiring special curricula, external specialists and therapists, and even more close monitoring.

Our results at the end of each school year are measured against the synopses submitted at the beginning of the school year. I submit that our Home School is much more rigorously monitored and tested than the "Public" Schools, and even the Private Schools.

Who decides what those levels are and if the children have met them?

As I indicated above, the State determines these parameters, as they are declared as goals for the "Public" Schools. Our curricula are evaluated, and our children measured, EVERY YEAR against these goals.

What should the consequences be if the parents are not meeting their responsibilities, and how should they be enforced?

The consequences are already in place in the Truancy Laws. There are fines, and home-schooled children who do not meet the stated goals can be required to attend the "Public" school. In cases where the parents are wantonly negligent and defiant, their children can even be removed from the home.

These laws, requirements, and penalties are already in place in my State for home schooled families, and I am sure that they are also in place in your State as well, to a lesser or greater degree.

And who is going to pay for this potentially intrusive system?

We the Home Schoolers pay for this system. We pay for the evaluations for each of our children. The system is a bit intrusive, but we feel it is less intrusive than having the "Public" school take our children for up to 8 hours a day, determine for us when we can take breaks and vacations, and indoctrinate our children with a socialist world-view and the Humanist philosophy, which I can sum as follows.


203 posted on 01/20/2006 5:50:30 AM PST by Westbrook (Having more children does not divide your love, it multiplies it!)
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To: Amelia

No, we have no seperate school for impaired students. They do share a seperate facility with another district for suspended thugs.

There is a contract speech therapist who works by appointment, not as a paid employee.

There is no special employee for vision or hearing impaired students.

AFAIK there is none of the other things you mentioned, though there are a few kids in wheelchairs who go to regular class schedules.


204 posted on 01/20/2006 8:51:51 AM PST by WillRain ("Might have been the losing side, still not convinced it was the wrong one.")
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To: Westbrook
You forgot, "or the People." Education is the responsibility of the Parents (the People), NOT the State.

If The People included responsibility for public education in their state Constitutions, I'd submit that education was the responsibility of those states.

YMMV.

205 posted on 01/20/2006 3:09:04 PM PST by Amelia (Education exists to overcome ignorance, not validate it.)
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To: WillRain
AFAIK there is none of the other things you mentioned, though there are a few kids in wheelchairs who go to regular class schedules.

Your school system must have an amazingly small percentage of exceptional students then.

206 posted on 01/20/2006 3:10:03 PM PST by Amelia (Education exists to overcome ignorance, not validate it.)
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To: Amelia

'I tend to think that part of the problem is that we're spending a lot of money on the "exceptional" rather than the "average", and the "average" students are getting less than one would think when looking at the "average" expenditures.'

I remember four basic categories of students:

1) Bright and want to learn
2) Average intelligence but may or may not care to learn
3) Discipline problems
4) Mentally impaired students

Group (1) is "exceptional" but costs less than the average. Groups (3) and (4) are "exceptional" in their own ways and cost much more than the average.

Putting them all in the same classroom raised the average cost and degraded results due to disruptions and different learning paces. Political correctness at my public schools guaranteed this attempt to pretend these different groups could be taught together.


207 posted on 01/20/2006 5:07:15 PM PST by Kellis91789 (I wonder how many heroes were really just incompetent suicides ?)
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To: Kellis91789
Putting them all in the same classroom raised the average cost and degraded results due to disruptions and different learning paces.

It is true that many of the countries cited as achieving more than we do are much more culturally and ethnically homogeneous than the U.S. is.

It's also true that children don't all have the same talents or learn at the same rate, and expecting them to is as foolish in my mind as expecting them all to wear the same size clothing or shoes.

One factor Stossell failed to consider, so far as I can tell (I was unable to watch the show) was the difference in population density in the U.S. versus Europe. In some areas I don't know that there are enough students to support what one might consider "competition" among schools.

IIRC, some school systems here attempted to implement competition similar to that in Europe, in which students have to attain certain standards by about 8th grade to be considered "college preparatory" - all others are consigned to a vocational track.

What I remember is that parents were in an uproar that (1) schools presumed to decide the fate of their children, (2) schools thought they could determine what a student was capable of at such a young age, and (3) schools were removing the right of self-determination from those children who weren't going to be allowed to take colleg-preparatory classes.

It seems fairly obvious to me that if students don't have a certain level of reading and math skills by 8th grade, it's going to be very difficult for them to complete the courses most colleges require for admission, and it seems to me that if parents and students were made aware of this situation from the beginning, some students might apply more effort in the lower grades, and a "real" high school education might be more of a reward and honor than an ordeal to be endured.

I do know many students who are "enduring" the current educational system & would be much happier under an apprenticeship program such as they have in Germany.

208 posted on 01/21/2006 7:21:25 AM PST by Amelia (Education exists to overcome ignorance, not validate it.)
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To: Amelia
If The People included responsibility for public education in their state Constitutions, I'd submit that education was the responsibility of those states.

I challenge you to find that in your State constitution.

I know it does not exist in our NH constitution.

Recently, the NH Supreme Court, populated by activist judges, was able to "discover" this "responsibility" of the State that had somehow been overlooked for more than 200 years. Their discovery was based upon the following language in article 83 of the NH State Constitution, under the sub-heading, "Encouragement of Literature, etc.; Control of Corporations, Monopolies, etc."

Based upon this phrase in Article 83, the NH Supreme Court ruled that the State of NH has an obligation to provide "Fair Funding for an Adequqate Education."

However, they neglected to rule that the State must also provide "Fair Funding" for, "Literature", "Sciences", and "all Seminaries" (private schools!!!), ALL of which are listed AHEAD OF "Public Schools".

The NH Legislature has been trying for over 5 years to satisfy the NH Supreme Court's caprice concerning the "Fair Funding" and "Adequate Education" terms in its ruling. This hideous ruling, which is based upon torturing the State's constitution and constitutes legislation from the bench, has been the cause for ENDLESS litigation by an army of "aggrieved citizens" who bring suit in order for their local School Collective to meet whatever whimsical notions these agents and their lawyers can concoct.

The State Legislature, and the State's Executive Council, have the power to vacate the Court's ruling, but they are too cowardly to do it.

209 posted on 01/22/2006 5:53:08 AM PST by Westbrook (Having more children does not divide your love, it multiplies it!)
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To: Westbrook
I challenge you to find that in your State constitution.

Well, that took about 30 seconds on a Google search:

Article 8, Section 1, Para. 1 of the Georgia Constitution states as follows: “The provision of an adequate public education for the citizens shall be a primary obligation of the State of Georgia.”

I know it does not exist in our NH constitution.

You are correct. I also found this:

New Hampshire's Constitution is one of the few in the nation that does not mandate the provision of a public school system.

I'm sorry for the political problems you are having in New Hampshire, and I do agree that if public education is to be a state obligation, it ought to be mandated by the people of the state as such, either through the constitution or other legislation.

Can we agree that each state is subject to its own constitution, and some things which are applicable in my state might not be so in yours?

210 posted on 01/22/2006 6:30:47 AM PST by Amelia (Education exists to overcome ignorance, not validate it.)
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To: Millee

Let's face it, public education is a business. Make that a BIG BUSINESS. And it is run exactly as the people in charge want it. Anybody who understands management can come to no other conclusion.
The best analogy I can offer is the military. The mission is accomplished by individuals in a unit. This would equate to teachers in a school. And in the military, everyone at any level above that unit exists to facilitate the accomplishment of the mission.
Now look at your local school and the top heavy local, state and national system that supports and controls it. How many of these people actually contribute anything to the education of your child?
And in the military, the commander is responsible for everythimg the unit accomplishes or fails to accomplish.
So, should we really be blaming the teacher?


211 posted on 01/22/2006 7:28:08 AM PST by OldEagle (May you live long enough to hear the legends of your own adventures.)
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To: OldEagle

Chapter II
The education system is a money tree and as long as the public is not satisfied with the fruit it bears, there will be the demand for more money. After all, it is for the children and they are our greatest asset and a mind is a terrible thing to waste. The people who run the system do not want to produce an acceptable product because that would cut down on their funding.
It all goes back to the idea of who is really in charge.


212 posted on 01/22/2006 7:50:13 AM PST by OldEagle (May you live long enough to hear the legends of your own adventures.)
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To: Amelia
Can we agree that each state is subject to its own constitution, and some things which are applicable in my state might not be so in yours?

Yes, we can agree to this.

However, I will venture that Article 8, Section 1, Para. 1 of your Georgia Constitution was written by a carpetbagger as some salt for the wound of the Confederate defeat. After all, they may have wanted to be sure that the North's side was the official one to be taught in the Public schools.

Just conjecture, of course, but you may want to determine when your State constitution was written, and by whom.

I posit further that many of the States that joined the Union after the 1850s are likely to have provisions such as this in their constitutions because of the pro-Marxist fervor that first took hold in Academia at that time. They haven't shaken it since.

Using the police powers of the State to compel soveriegn citizens to furnish moneys for the arbitrary benefit of a government school system, or any other bureaucratic experiment, is clearly a perversion of the ends of government and the manifest endangerment of public liberty.

The ends of government are to secure and guarantee the common, inalienable, God-given rights of the people, not to bully them into participating in social experiments.

Government cannot grant rights. Only tyrants believe that rights can be granted or rescinded either by edict or by majority.

In vigilant defense of this principle, our revolutionary era State legislature refused to ratify the federal constitution without a Bill of Rights.

Let's face it.

The 150-year-old Public School experiment is a failure. No amount of money will be enough to make it workable. Experience with the Public School system has shown that no matter how much money it gets, it is never enough.

It is not rational to repeat a process while expecting different results. The government school experiment has gone beyond the point of diminishing returns, not just financially, but academically and ethically as well.

213 posted on 01/22/2006 11:16:46 PM PST by Westbrook (Having more children does not divide your love, it multiplies it!)
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To: Westbrook
I will venture that Article 8, Section 1, Para. 1 of your Georgia Constitution was written by a carpetbagger as some salt for the wound of the Confederate defeat...Just conjecture, of course, but you may want to determine when your State constitution was written, and by whom.

I guess you're saying I should oppose it because some Yankee probably stuck the clause in there to help the Negroes? Give me a break.

I posit further that many of the States that joined the Union after the 1850s are likely to have provisions such as this in their constitutions because of the pro-Marxist fervor that first took hold in Academia at that time.

Actually, there were public schools in the colonies that would become the United States before there was a United States, half of the original states had provisions for education in their constitutions, Thomas Jefferson favored public education, and there were actually public schools in some areas of the South before the Civil War. A couple of links regarding the history of public education in the United States can be found here and here, and I'm sure you can find others. (Ironically, you may find you have a lot of beliefs in common with the authors of the more leftist site.)

The 150-year-old Public School experiment is a failure. No amount of money will be enough to make it workable.

Those are opinion statements expressed as facts. In some areas and for some students, the public school system works quite well. Other schools are abysmal failures. Much depends on the type community in which the schools exist.

As one of the links I gave you states, a major difference between schools in the United States and those in the rest of the world is the degree of local control we allow.

Oddly enough, data gathered because of No Child Left Behind is showing that this local control may be one of our system's greatest weaknesses - in many states, students who do quite well on state competency tests are scoring quite poorly indeed on national tests such as the NAEP. In other words, locally-set standards vary widely and may not be very stringent at all.

214 posted on 01/23/2006 3:39:47 PM PST by Amelia (Education exists to overcome ignorance, not validate it.)
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To: Amelia
I guess you're saying I should oppose it because some Yankee probably stuck the clause in there to help the Negroes? Give me a break.

I should have seen the race card coming, but I expected better.

It's extremely unlikely that the aforementioned clause was imposed for so altruistic a purpose. I surmise that you are imposing your 21st century sensibilities upon 19th century realities.

There is a VAST difference in the American Public School system devised for the former colonies by Noah Webster and the Marxist abomination foisted upon us by Horace Mann and his ideological descendants, John Dewey and Carl Rogers.

Noah Webster's system was distributed and community-based, allowing for home shcools and other methods of education that were unexploited before his time. The cornerstone of Webster's Americanist education system was the Bible.

If you have time, you might want to compare and contrast what kind of a man Noah Webster was, and his vision for American education, with Horace Mann, John Dewey, and Carl Rogers and their visions.

The system introduced by Horace Mann supplanted Webster's system with a system centralized into "School Districts", a clever euphemism for Marx's School Collectives. This set the stage for what was later to be centralized into the hideously top-heavy Government Blob that passes for Public Education today.

Literacy and numeracy under Webster's system increased to greater than 90%, as long as this country remained "under God", and Webster's overall Americanist vision was implemented in spite of the Marxist cancer spreading in the American Education underbelly.

Once the Marxist cancer metastasized completely, literacy and numeracy rates began tanking.

I don't have the statistics handy to determine the reason, and I'm a bit too busy to do the research right now, but perhaps the reason NCLB is not working is that it is still based upon an anti-God system, which is a rejection of the cornerstone of Noah Webster's Americanist education paradigm.

I submit that no education system can enjoy enduring success with the Humanist Manifesto as its guiding light.

215 posted on 01/23/2006 4:56:56 PM PST by Westbrook (Having more children does not divide your love, it multiplies it!)
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To: Westbrook
I should have seen the race card coming, but I expected better. It's extremely unlikely that the aforementioned clause was imposed for so altruistic a purpose.

Forgive me if I misunderstood your implications.

There is a VAST difference in the American Public School system devised for the former colonies by Noah Webster and the Marxist abomination foisted upon us by Horace Mann and his ideological descendants, John Dewey and Carl Rogers.

I think it far more likely that Marx was influenced by Mann than vice versa, considering that Mann was working to reform the educational system in the United States before Marx even reached puberty, and in fact Mann was dead before Marx was widely known or even published in English.

I don't have the statistics handy to determine the reason, and I'm a bit too busy to do the research right now, but perhaps the reason NCLB is not working is that it is still based upon an anti-God system, which is a rejection of the cornerstone of Noah Webster's Americanist education paradigm.

I don't think we've given NCLB enough time to know whether or not it's working to date. It hasn't even been completely implemented.

However, even a rudimentary search should let you see that currently states are still setting the standards for success, and some states have much higher standards than others. That suggests to me that the educational system works better in some states than others. I think that could be a significant problem. What do you think?

216 posted on 01/23/2006 6:06:57 PM PST by Amelia (Education exists to overcome ignorance, not validate it.)
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To: Amelia

Research has shown that THE first-order indicator of academic success is parental involvement, that is, academic success is most directly proportional to parental support and involvement. The amount of money spent, as it relates to academic success, shows almost no statistical correlation, being at the level of statistical noise.

In fact, if one were to try to draw a correlation between money spent and academic performance, he would have to conclude that the amount of money spent is INVERSELY proportional to academic performance.

Too much involvement by the State, the courts, and even the "community", have been shown to have adverse affects. The micro-management of education by the courts and law-making bodies that we have seen in the last 40 years has been particularly destructive.

For corroboration, you can peruse the Home School Legal Defense research pages at the following link.

http://www.hslda.org/research/default.asp


217 posted on 01/24/2006 4:46:43 AM PST by Westbrook (Having more children does not divide your love, it multiplies it!)
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To: Westbrook
Research has shown that THE first-order indicator of academic success is parental involvement, that is, academic success is most directly proportional to parental support and involvement.

I don't think you'll find a teacher in this country who will dispute that. In fact, I'd wager that it's a major reason that wealthy suburban schools are largely "successful" and poor urban schools usually are not.

The amount of money spent, as it relates to academic success, shows almost no statistical correlation, being at the level of statistical noise. In fact, if one were to try to draw a correlation between money spent and academic performance, he would have to conclude that the amount of money spent is INVERSELY proportional to academic performance.

If there's no correlation, there's no correlation. You can't have it both ways unless you're playing games with the statistics.

Any sort of analysis of money versus performance would have a number of confounding factors, however. For instance, the cost of living is higher in some parts of the country than others, so more money would be spent in those areas without any appreciable "value" being added.

On the other hand, wealthier areas tend to have both higher property values, and thus higher revenues available for education from property taxes, but also a higher proportion of educated and concerned parents. Those areas might have better performance, but not necessarily due to the higher expenditures.

Too much involvement by the State, the courts, and even the "community", have been shown to have adverse affects. The micro-management of education by the courts and law-making bodies that we have seen in the last 40 years has been particularly destructive.

Again, I don't think you'd find too many teachers who'd disagree with you. A lot of what gets blamed on teachers and "educrats" is actually the fault of judges and legislators.

218 posted on 01/24/2006 5:27:56 PM PST by Amelia (Education exists to overcome ignorance, not validate it.)
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To: Amelia
f there's no correlation, there's no correlation. You can't have it both ways unless you're playing games with the statistics.

My point EXACTLY.

It is not the majority of teachers individually that present the problem.

It is their closed-shop union schools and the fervant, even rabid, anti-American, anti-Christian bias prevalent in the colleges that prepare them, that present the greatest part of the problem.

A very large part of the definition of a Professional is one who represents himself in his field of expertise. Professionals typically belong to guilds or societies that foster advances in their field, but do not represent their members in "collective bargaining" (a Marxist term if ever there was one).

Historically, unions are for those incapable of representing or defending themselves in the face of organized opposition or bastions of moneyed interests.

One can hardly characterize the homeowners and residents of a town as a bastion of moneyed interests organizing to oppress the teachers.

By organizing themselves into unions, the teachers have sold-out their heritage for a bowl of pottage, having foregone their professional status for the status of a factory worker, or skilled labor at best.

However, most teachers do not have a choice anymore whether to join the union.

Virtually all "Public" schools are closed shops, meaning, if you don't belong to the union, and accept all of the implications that has, then you cannot work there.

As with most union shops, quality declines as costs increase. This is a demonstrable, historical fact.

219 posted on 01/24/2006 11:17:30 PM PST by Westbrook (Having more children does not divide your love, it multiplies it!)
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To: Westbrook
My point EXACTLY.

Not quite. First you say there is no correlation whatsoever, and then you say there is definitely a negative correlation. It has to be either/or; can't be both.

But, as I say, there are many confounding factors.

A very large part of the definition of a Professional is one who represents himself in his field of expertise. Professionals typically belong to guilds or societies that foster advances in their field, but do not represent their members in "collective bargaining" (a Marxist term if ever there was one).

I agree with you.

One can hardly characterize the homeowners and residents of a town as a bastion of moneyed interests organizing to oppress the teachers.

You'd be surprised at some of the small towns...just getting a job can require family or political connections, rather than expertise. Also, offending the powers-that-be (for example, "failing" the star football player so that he's ineligible to play) could be a "firing offense" if there's no tenure.

By organizing themselves into unions, the teachers have sold-out their heritage for a bowl of pottage, having foregone their professional status for the status of a factory worker, or skilled labor at best.

I'm not sure that teachers ever, in most places, had the stature of other professionals, although at one point in time there was more respect for teachers AND others in positions of authority such as policemen I think.

However, most teachers do not have a choice anymore whether to join the union. Virtually all "Public" schools are closed shops, meaning, if you don't belong to the union, and accept all of the implications that has, then you cannot work there.

This may be true in your state, but it is not in mine. Again, there is enough local & state control in the United States that it's impossible to paint education as a whole with a broad brush.

The major reason people I know have joined the union (which isn't strong in my state to begin with) is for liability insurance, in case parents sued because of a child being injured on the playground or in lab class, for instance.

Until the legislature passed a law giving all teachers a certain amount of such insurance a couple of years ago, the only way to obtain it was through joining a union or other teacher's organization. I tried to get it through my homeowner's policy, for instance, but could not.

220 posted on 01/25/2006 3:02:31 AM PST by Amelia (Education exists to overcome ignorance, not validate it.)
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