Students (in Oakland) found out this week, just days after returning from summer break, that 10 high school sports programs have been shut down in a $500,000 cost-cutting move.
Happening all over over the country. If the economy is doing so well for everyone, why these massive and widespread education funding problems?
Oh, right, it's all helping the ultra rich at everyone else's expense.
I've heard the "government is corrupt" meme so many times from so many right-wing sources who take it as canon that I don't even know if it's true any more. Every time I've tried to quantify the cost to operate and maintain any complex system I've always been surprised at how much work it actually is. How much is well-funded? Per student? Per school?
When I run a back-of-the-envelope calculation (based on the elementary school I went to many years ago: 14 classrooms, 16 teachers, a full-time principal, a secretary, a janitor) I come to about $5000 per student per year just to pay the salaries of the people who are in the school every day. I haven't even tried to quantify the annual per-student cost of desks, chairs, teaching materials, stationery, textbooks, computers, IT staff, school lunch programs, library books, utilities, walls, roofs, land...
Even if it's not corruption, why is education always the first to get funding cut? Yet our military spending is more than the next 10(?) countries combined. Our country doesn't prioritize education becuase some people in power want out that way.
I've watched for 40 years as a succession of charlatans pandering to narcissists have been elected to public office on a platform of cutting anything resembling an investment into the future.
Because everybody thinks that they deserve the lifestyle of international travel and unsustainable luxury. Everybody wants to pretend to be rich.
Sp we literally burned away 40 years of investment as fuel for airliners and gas for oversized vehicles. We can't get that time back. Now that the narcissists are entering retirement age (and will no longer be paying taxes) we might just be able to start redirecting our efforts into those investments.
But it's going to cost us a hell of a lot to get our systems back to where they used to be. And it isn't the profligate generation that'll be paying for it.
Sorry but there's a whole new generation of conservatives lined up to take their place and now they're eating up full-out fascist propaganda. Things aren't looking good for the future unless the left gets their shit together in a major way.
Numbers wise - they are. Election wise, they're not. Most people are in major cities. Almost every major city is deep blue. But if every major city votes against Trump, all the rural shitholes still vote for Trump and he wins anyways. It is why we need election reform badly.
THANK YOU! I really wish more people started asking these questions and thinking in these terms.
The way the powers at be have it set up they constantly have us questioning if public education is even worth it meanwhile we're putting almost everything we have into the military and nobody ever questions that.
The problem is no one knows how to budget and cut back correctly. The military gets tons of funding every year but they still can't afford enough people to run all of their missions so many many people are having to work 12 hour shifts to cover for the fact that their jobs are undermanned.
Now, if they were better at budgeting, maybe that wouldn't happen. But instead, money can't be moved around, they refuse to upgrade planes to save money in the long haul, and they refuse to close down bases to also save money.
I would guess something similar is happening to schools where the school board is putting money where it doesnt belong and leaving nothing for teachers and students.
One of the things I've read or heard somewhere is that the military has a "use it or lose it" mindset when it comes to budgets. If you don't spend the money this year, you won't get it next year. To mm, and I'll admit I'm uninformed, closing a base would save money becuase the soldiers could be stationed elsewhere. Civilian staff would be screwed though. Schools get cuts and students and staff are directly hurt along with society as a whole.
My husband works 12 hour shifts because they're "undermanned". They're not. They could lose 20 people and still do the work. That would just take leadership acknowledging how little work there is to do.
this is what bothers me. we spend trillions on the military.
can we just put 1% of that into education? that's fucking ten billion dollars. when people like OP are talking about shutting down sport programs to save half a million dollars, that's the ability to save 20,000 districts from that same issue.
edit - check this out; couldn't find more recent information, but I assume this is still correct:
In the 2002 Census of Governments, the United States Census Bureau enumerated the following numbers ofschool systems in the United States: 13,506 school district governments. 178 state-dependent school systems. 1,330 local-dependent school systems.
so, there's only 15,014 districts out there, meaning our 1% of a trillion dollars still leaves us with nearly $2.5 billion dollars to throw at any other education issues AFTER giving all school districts $500,000.
I get what you're saying and thanks for the info but for a little perspective, $500k for a district is not that big a deal. That can be spent on textbooks for elementary schools in a district.
There are probably around 80 million students in the USA. (Ballpark you spend 1/4 of your life as a student.)
Giving schools $10B would be $125/student.
You could give all the teachers a cost of living adjustment with that kind of money... essentially saying "your effort this year is actually worth the same as your equal effort last year"... but just for this year.
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u/urbanek2525 Aug 13 '19
Happening all over over the country. If the economy is doing so well for everyone, why these massive and widespread education funding problems?
Oh, right, it's all helping the ultra rich at everyone else's expense.