Posted on 10/18/2011 1:33:10 PM PDT by mdittmar
Washington, D.C. – Nevada Senator Harry Reid made the following remarks today on the Senate floor regarding state and local cuts to education in Nevada. Below are his remarks as prepared for delivery:
America’s education system is under siege. The terrible recession that has put millions of families in our country in a desperate economic situation has also put our schools at risk.
Since 2008, this country has lost 300,000 education jobs, including nearly 200,000 in the last year alone. And without talented, dedicated teachers and support staff, our schools cannot provide the world-class education students need to succeed in today’s difficult economic climate.
As state and local governments are forced to slash education funding again and again, it jeopardizes the futures of millions of children – regardless of where they live or how much money their parents make.
Nevada is facing a $1.2 billion budget shortfall in 2013, practically ensuring further cuts to state and local education. But Nevada can ill afford to lose more teachers, police and first responders.
The state has already slashed state education funding below pre-recession levels. And additional cuts will place thousands of Nevada teacher jobs at risk.
School districts in Nevada have already made difficult cuts – laying off teachers, eliminating programs and reducing the number of hours children spend in school.
The state has delayed expansion of all-day kindergarten, eliminated resources for gifted and talented programs and cut a magnet program for students who are deaf or hard of hearing.
Further cuts will affect the basic pillars of American education.
Already the school board in Lyon County, a rural part of Nevada, has considered moving to a four-day school week.
Students in the United States already spend much less time in school than students in other countries, including those with whom we compete for jobs. Most American pupils spend a month less in the classroom than those in South Korea and Japan, whose students are among the highest performing in the world.
At a time when Nevadans are competing for jobs with graduates from countries around the world as well as those in neighboring states, school districts shouldn’t be forced to make decisions like the one facing Lyon County.
The Teachers and First Responders Back to Work Act, filed last night and led by Senator Menendez, will ensure the Lyon County School District won’t have to choose between laying teachers off and reducing the school year.
And it will protect gains made by school districts like the one in Washoe County, which increased its graduation rate from 55 percent to nearly 70 percent.
Budget cuts would threaten that progress. The district can’t expect to improve on these gains if it has to jam more students in every class and lay off literacy and math specialists.
The Teachers and First Responders legislation will stem the loss of education jobs and help districts like Washoe continue to improve.
This legislation will provide Nevada with an additional $260 million to keep teachers in the classroom and maintain class sizes. It will support 3,600 education jobs in the state and give the economy a jolt.
And it won’t add a dime to the deficit. Instead, it asks millionaires and billionaires to contribute a tiny fraction more – one half of one percent more – to help turn our economy around. That’s an idea two-thirds of Americans and a majority of Republicans support.
This nation’s schools have already been hit hard by state and local budget cuts. We cannot afford to lose more teachers, or to lay off more police or first responders.
In Nevada, local governments have already made the difficult choice to cut 8,800 jobs. These unprecedented layoffs have extended the recession and slowed the recovery in Nevada.
And further budget shortfalls threaten thousands more jobs. Nationwide, state and local budget cuts could cost as many as 280,000 teacher jobs next year unless we act.
This Teachers and First Responders legislation will invest $30 billion to create or save nearly 400,000 teacher jobs. That money will help states and school districts stop more layoffs, and rehire tens of thousands of teachers laid off since this severe recession began.
It will also invest $5 billion to retain and rehire the police, firefighters and first responders who have protected our communities throughout tough economic times.
That is why it is so important that the Senate move quickly to this legislation.
I hope that we will be able to work together to finish the three appropriations bills before the Senate this week without the kind of obstructionism we have seen over the last 10 months.
Teachers out of work through no fault of their own and students who desperately need a good education are relying on us to act.
That’s what we’re afraid of...........
Then why did the demorat Senate shoot the bill down?
Exactly. Sit those poor, undertaught students down in front of their computers at home to learn via Khan Academy.
In buffalo NY, the city spends $23,200 per student, per year. Half do not even graduate high school. Money IS the problem - in that it has corrupted the system and there is actually too much of it being spent.
They’re already in the classroom. Now if only they’ll just teach something besides Heather has Two Mommys.
Whats the matter Reid, out of slush fund money already?
Why is it always about keeping teachers in the clasroom.
Every time a Democrat opens their yap it is to give more money to schools, to keep teachers jobs.
The same teachers that are sending kids out of schools who cannot read or write, or add a column of figures, but they know about homo’s and how to put a rubber on a banana.
What happens if they have to pee?
Sorry Stinky! You’re going to have to get them in the classroom first. A lot of those maggots are out in the streets marching against the Jews.
The sky is falling....the sky is falling.....chicken little strikes again!
For one year.
Until right after the 2012 Election.
Government jobs do not produce anything. They’re a service industry paid for by taxpayers. They produce no manufactured product for sale nor do they provide manufacturing jobs for people to be employed in. The more demand for products the more companies will hire the more the unemployment rate will go down. Obviously Obamalamadingdong refuses to recognize that fact, either willful ignorance and stupidity or down right on purpose.
Why should teacher jobs be more important than other jobs?
Oh, yeah, the Democrats are in the teacher unions’ pockets.
You are correct. Reminds me of the moron democrat congressman who insisted that creating new regulations create jobs—to enforce the regulations. These people think like second graders.
And remember only for a year. Then the states have to start picking up the bill. Just like Clinton did with his 100,000 cops on the street bill. The cities had to pick up the bill after a year. They wound up laying off a whole bunch of them.
Every job in government (clerk, mechanic, teacher, scientist, fireman, policeman, bureaucrat, etc., etc.) is part of the size of government, and every paycheck issued to one of those employees must first be earned by wealth-producing workers in the private sector whose earnings are coercively confiscated from those workers and their employers, run through the gluttonous bureaucratic mechanism of government, and then paid out to the government employee.
Government creates no wealth, but its political elites siphon off the wealth created in the private sector and use it as political "currency" in order to perpetuate themselves and their cohorts in positions of power. With that "currency" they exchange promises of goodies for votes.
The cry to "create or save jobs" for government employees is a cry to enslave more ordinary citizens as a means for retaining political power by so-called "progressives," whose policies are the most regressive in the history of civilization.
Americans should hold fast to the Founders' ideas of liberty instead of allowing its leaders to plunge it into European-style socialism.
From the Liberty Fund Library is "A Plea for Liberty: An Argument Against Socialism and Socialistic Legislation," edited by Thomas Mackay (1849 - 1912), Chapter 1, excerpted final paragraphs from Edward Stanley Robertson's essay:
"I have suggested that the scheme of Socialism is wholly incomplete unless it includes a power of restraining the increase of population, which power is so unwelcome to Englishmen that the very mention of it seems to require an apology. I have showed that in France, where restraints on multiplication have been adopted into the popular code of morals, there is discontent on the one hand at the slow rate of increase, while on the other, there is still a 'proletariat,' and Socialism is still a power in politics.
I.44
"I have put the question, how Socialism would treat the residuum of the working class and of all classes—the class, not specially vicious, nor even necessarily idle, but below the average in power of will and in steadiness of purpose. I have intimated that such persons, if they belong to the upper or middle classes, are kept straight by the fear of falling out of class, and in the working class by positive fear of want. But since Socialism purposes to eliminate the fear of want, and since under Socialism the hierarchy of classes will either not exist at all or be wholly transformed, there remains for such persons no motive at all except physical coercion. Are we to imprison or flog all the 'ne'er-do-wells'?
I.45
"I began this paper by pointing out that there are inequalities and anomalies in the material world, some of which, like the obliquity of the ecliptic and the consequent inequality of the day's length, cannot be redressed at all. Others, like the caprices of sunshine and rainfall in different climates, can be mitigated, but must on the whole be endured. I am very far from asserting that the inequalities and anomalies of human society are strictly parallel with those of material nature. I fully admit that we are under an obligation to control nature so far as we can. But I think I have shown that the Socialist scheme cannot be relied upon to control nature, because it refuses to obey her. Socialism attempts to vanquish nature by a front attack. Individualism, on the contrary, is the recognition, in social politics, that nature has a beneficent as well as a malignant side. The struggle for life provides for the various wants of the human race, in somewhat the same way as the climatic struggle of the elements provides for vegetable and animal life—imperfectly, that is, and in a manner strongly marked by inequalities and anomalies. By taking advantage of prevalent tendencies, it is possible to mitigate these anomalies and inequalities, but all experience shows that it is impossible to do away with them. All history, moreover, is the record of the triumph of Individualism over something which was virtually Socialism or Collectivism, though not called by that name. In early days, and even at this day under archaic civilisations, the note of social life is the absence of freedom. But under every progressive civilisation, freedom has made decisive strides—broadened down, as the poet says, from precedent to precedent. And it has been rightly and naturally so.
I.46
"Freedom is the most valuable of all human possessions, next after life itself. It is more valuable, in a manner, than even health. No human agency can secure health; but good laws, justly administered, can and do secure freedom. Freedom, indeed, is almost the only thing that law can secure. Law cannot secure equality, nor can it secure prosperity. In the direction of equality, all that law can do is to secure fair play, which is equality of rights but is not equality of conditions. In the direction of prosperity, all that law can do is to keep the road open. That is the Quintessence of Individualism, and it may fairly challenge comparison with that Quintessence of Socialism we have been discussing. Socialism, disguise it how we may, is the negation of Freedom. That it is so, and that it is also a scheme not capable of producing even material comfort in exchange for the abnegations of Freedom, I think the foregoing considerations amply prove." EDWARD STANLEY ROBERTSON
True. See my Post #18.
What Reid said is what we already know, i.e., that the goal is employ teachers, not the education of children.
It’s like in NY State where my mom lives. We wanted to retire there so we could help her so she didn’t have to rely so much on the Office Of The Aging. We investigated, but the taxes were prohibitive so we didn’t move there.
I asked an employee at the Office Of The Aging why they didn’t lower taxes so adult children could live there, help their parents, and take some burden off the government. She looked at me as if I were an idiot and said, “This office isn’t here to help the old people. It’s here to give jobs to the citizens.” Silly me. Who knew?
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