It’s all about where the money goes

If you look at the policies regarding public education there is no effort being made to cut overall spending by the state.  This isn’t really about saving.

The attacks being made are against public schools, teachers and unions – where the money goes – but not against the spending.  The cuts are enormous and devastating, but while funding for public schools is cut, the collection of taxes is not.  The idea isn’t to eliminate the revenue but to redirect it.

If you cut the funding to public schools enough then you can make the schools look bad, which reinforces what is already being said.  Yet the alternatives have nothing to do with making school funding equitable or lower or even with improving public schools.  The only alternatives offered are private and charter schools.

Vouchers are intended to fund private schools with tax dollars just as charter schools are funded with tax dollars.  That’s the redirection.  The idea is to take tax money away from public schools and public employees and funnel it into private corporations who will take over the education of America’s children.  This plan offers less accountability, lower standards and no improvement in education.  Recent studies have shown that charter schools do not perform better than public schools.

No one is talking about cutting taxes or reducing overall spending.  There are only two goals: breaking the teacher’s unions and putting tax dollars into the pockets of private corporations.

It’s about money.

It’s not about education.

Deliberate malevolence

People who want to destroy public education are evil.

I really can’t think of another word for it.

Learning

I find it hard to believe, even as cynical as I am, that I live in a time when people need to be convinced of the importance and benefits of public education.

Rambling

You know, I’ve been supporting teachers on this blog, but I have to admit that I had some lousy ones. I also had some great ones. What I want to do is support public schools and the unions. The attacks lately are designed to push tax dollars to private companies and fund corporate tax breaks with cuts to the middle class.

That is my problem with all of this.

I do, however, think that public schools need to be fixed. I have a feeling that there are a lot of teachers who should be replaced. I also think that the reason for that is that many schools have not been attracting the most qualified teachers because the budgets keep being cut so they don’t pay enough. It doesn’t help when teachers are targets, either.

The same is true with the quality of the schools themselves, their state of repair. Budget cuts lead to lower school quality in level of education and buildings falling apart.

Unions get blamed a lot, but you can have a union and still be able to fire unqualified teachers. They are not mutually exclusive. And I don’t think collective bargaining ever kept a roof from being repaired.

Fix the problem, don’t just trash the entire school system. However bad things are, it is not the ‘public’ part that is the problem. A phrase about babies and bath water comes to mind.

Priorities are messed up and need to be reordered. I know what I think should be done, but for now I’ll just say that there needs to be more equality.

Oh, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen only one contestant make to Final Jeopardy before. Now I have a Weird Al song going through my head.

Public education

I’m a big fan of public schools. I’m not saying that they’re all great and that there’s no room for improvement. What I like is the idea that everyone gets a chance to get a decent education, which is important because it does more than help the individual. Education can make you a more well-rounded person, but it also helps society in general if everyone has an opportunity to live up to their potential. Our communities are better places if everyone can learn the skills to be productive, get a good job and contribute. That’s why we all pay for it even if we don’t have children in the schools.

What I don’t like is the escalation in attacks on public schools. It began decades ago in subtle ways. Class performance was closely examined to call into question teacher effectiveness with no regard to student ability. Then we get standardized tests which do little to educate but are great for manufacturing flaws where there might not be any. One of the more insidious ploys, before the attack on unions started, was to call them government schools.

For some people, government is a bad thing. People support the public – they are the public, so public schools are acknowledged as a good thing. But if you call them government schools then you’ve created a boogeyman to scare people with. It’s all marketing, but where calling prunes dried plums is meant to get you to taste one and like them, calling public schools government schools is designed to get you to mistrust them.

The golden age of America people long for was a time when kids went to (mostly public) school and then went on to trade school or college or an apprenticeship or just worked so they could be doctors and lawyers and plumbers and astronauts and even politicians. Today if you go to public school you’re being manipulated into being a tool of the system. There’s no mention of how schools have always reflected the dominant social mores of their local communities and still do to this day. Nope, now they’re just evil.

But somehow private schools are just wonderful places of joy and learning. That is they are if you can afford them.

In many states funding for public education is being cut at the state level. At the same time local school districts are being blocked from raising more money on their own. State money is cut and local taxes can’t be raised, so we have the self-fulfilling prophecy of school systems in decline. Public schools may need reform and changes to their processes. They need support and they need money. Getting rid of No Child Left Behind would help. That was only ever a back-handed way to promote privatization and never meant to help schools. But schools aren’t failing financially because of bad systems or bad teachers or unions. They are failing because administrations that want to funnel tax dollars into private schools are forcing public schools to fail.

As an example I give you New Jersey, where the state school budget has been cut, the application for federal grants was deliberately fumbled and the Governor blamed the teachers for his own actions. At the same time, a company can get a tax credit for contributing to the tuition for a student to go to a private school – but not for contributing to public schools.

When you control the purse strings and you cut off money to public schools and then point at them and say – Look, they’re not performing well and it’s all their fault – you’re pointing in the wrong direction.

Public schools

The Governor of New Jersey’s budget plan cuts funding to public schools but somehow he can find the money to give more to charter schools. Funny how there’s tax money to give to the non-union privately owned schools but not for public schools.

There is also a proposed bill to give tax credits to corporations that give money for private school scholarships. Which is just more corporate tax breaks – a dollar for dollar credit if you support private schools – while funding for public schools gets cut.

The Governor’s new proposed budget also limits the amount by which local municipalities can raise property tax rates which will further erode funding for public schools.

If there is a problem with public schools then they should be fixed. So far no one is listing problems with public schools in New Jersey, just complaints about unions.

There is an argument that if the surcharge on income over $400,000 is reinstated people will leave the state. That’s BS because the rate of millionaires leaving New Jersey when the tax was in place was no more than the average for people moving to other states for any reason before the tax was enacted. There’s research on that sort of thing.

There are no good arguments for gutting public education. Attacks on the schools and the teachers are just an excuse for putting tax dollars in the hands of private corporations. If schools need to be improved than that is what should be done.

What’s going on now is political maneuvering, it is not governance or statesmanship. What do people have against public education, anyway?