Education funding (split from "Classical Liberals")

[Jimmy Higgins]

So essentially the premise of government school is:
The public provide money to the schools, and in exchange the schools provide education to the public.

Seeing the results, I think the public is due a refund due to breach of contract on the part of the schools.

It’s fun that if the schools fail at their task, the solution isn’t to fire the “educators” but to give them more tax-payer money. Rinse and repeat.

I can think of probably two or three teachers in my entire life that shouldn't have been teachers. 0 so far for my daughter.

Public schools are "failing" is a mantra that isn't demonstrated to much satisfaction. There is a propensity for people to point to private schools which cost a lot of money, yet those schools cherry pick students which leads to higher grades for them, but lower in the public school the cherry picking was done.

 

[SigmatheZeta]

Oh, and if you want to talk genetic predestination, I will tell you what I am genetically predestined to. One side of my family routinely buries family members that are barely more than children after they die early deaths of liver failure. The other side of the family is so socially disconnected that I have never even met any of them, and from what I understand, they don't tend to hold marriages together very often.

I can trace my attachment to intellectualism back to 3 teachers that made a difference. One was a science fiction and fantasy nerd that happened to have the books on her shelf that got me obsessed with dragons. I read all of them. That was when I was 8. I was also heavily influenced by Holocaust literature: the fact that I was a transgender girl from a conservative evangelical background made me open to listening to people that had also been unjustly treated as monsters by their society. Another teacher, when I was 12, noticed that I was a little bookworm, and she suggested that I should read the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and that was how I learned to have enough of a sense of humor, in regard to how crazy the world is, that I managed not to kill myself.

3 good teachers out of them that I ever had were enough to help a transgender girl with a neurological disability survive coming from a conservative evangelical background and attending a school that became famous for its abuses against kids with neurological disabilities.

I should have been able to count on all of them, but training teachers to have that kind of perception--so they know the right times to intervene when they can make a real and permanent difference--costs money. Looking back, I think that many more of them would have wanted to be that kind of teacher, but unfortunately, not all of them knew how. Not all of them had it in them.

It costs money to train teachers into those kinds of skills. It costs money to train a teacher to recognize the signs of when one sentence can turn a kid's life around or even give that kid a fighting chance of survival, in some cases.

Nobody is born with that kind of a grasp on psychology. Nobody is born knowing the signs of when a kid is mentally in a place where they might be ready to embrace a permanent change in how they think and how they deal with the world.

While it is true that you cannot really teach natural talent, natural talent cannot do very much without being given direction, and you cannot attract natural talent without successfully recruiting it to your cause.

 

[Trausti]

So essentially the premise of government school is:
The public provide money to the schools, and in exchange the schools provide education to the public.

Seeing the results, I think the public is due a refund due to breach of contract on the part of the schools.

It’s fun that if the schools fail at their task, the solution isn’t to fire the “educators” but to give them more tax-payer money. Rinse and repeat.

I can think of probably two or three teachers in my entire life that shouldn't have been teachers. 0 so far for my daughter.

Public schools are "failing" is a mantra that isn't demonstrated to much satisfaction. There is a propensity for people to point to private schools which cost a lot of money, yet those schools cherry pick students which leads to higher grades for them, but lower in the public school the cherry picking was done.

We may not disagree here. What really matters, as you’ve observed, is the student population. It isn’t about the spending.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

So essentially the premise of government school is:
The public provide money to the schools, and in exchange the schools provide education to the public.

Seeing the results, I think the public is due a refund due to breach of contract on the part of the schools.

It’s fun that if the schools fail at their task, the solution isn’t to fire the “educators” but to give them more tax-payer money. Rinse and repeat.

I can think of probably two or three teachers in my entire life that shouldn't have been teachers. 0 so far for my daughter.

Public schools are "failing" is a mantra that isn't demonstrated to much satisfaction. There is a propensity for people to point to private schools which cost a lot of money, yet those schools cherry pick students which leads to higher grades for them, but lower in the public school the cherry picking was done.

We may not disagree here. What really matters, as you’ve observed, is the student population. It isn’t about the spending.

Okay, so you passively concede the schools aren't failing. So that'd mean we shouldn't fire the "educators".

Places like Akron, Ohio needed a good deal of capital to deal with a couple things.

1) City population shrunk over several decades. Too many schools for not enough students.
2) Many of the schools were very old, costly to maintain.

So the 'tossing more money at the problem' thing was actually about reconstruction a school system with new buildings that weren't 100 years old and provided enough desks appropriate for the population of the city.

The complaints against schools are so often vague and presumptive that the school districts are static and nothing changes. Just seems so ignorant and lacking in critical thinking, that maybe those people were left behind in public schools 40 years ago.

 

[Trausti]

So essentially the premise of government school is:
The public provide money to the schools, and in exchange the schools provide education to the public.

Seeing the results, I think the public is due a refund due to breach of contract on the part of the schools.

It’s fun that if the schools fail at their task, the solution isn’t to fire the “educators” but to give them more tax-payer money. Rinse and repeat.

I can think of probably two or three teachers in my entire life that shouldn't have been teachers. 0 so far for my daughter.

Public schools are "failing" is a mantra that isn't demonstrated to much satisfaction. There is a propensity for people to point to private schools which cost a lot of money, yet those schools cherry pick students which leads to higher grades for them, but lower in the public school the cherry picking was done.

We may not disagree here. What really matters, as you’ve observed, is the student population. It isn’t about the spending.

Okay, so you passively concede the schools aren't failing. So that'd mean we shouldn't fire the "educators".

Places like Akron, Ohio needed a good deal of capital to deal with a couple things.

1) City population shrunk over several decades. Too many schools for not enough students.
2) Many of the schools were very old, costly to maintain.

So the 'tossing more money at the problem' thing was actually about reconstruction a school system with new buildings that weren't 100 years old and provided enough desks appropriate for the population of the city.

The complaints against schools are so often vague and presumptive that the school districts are static and nothing changes. Just seems so ignorant and lacking in critical thinking, that maybe those people were left behind in public schools 40 years ago.

I’m more about recognizing that money has it’s limits. No amount of money will fix students and parents who don’t care.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

@Loren Pechtel Your views are still basically authoritarian. The reason why I accuse you so is that education, especially education in cognitive skills like critical thinking, is the single biggest threat in the world against authoritarian governments. Authoritarianism cannot survive in a world where most people are educated in the kinds of thinking skills that they need in order to solve their own problems in rational ways. When authoritarian politicians get into power, the first thing they do, under whatever pretense they choose to do so, is to attack the education system. Whether you are attacking attempts to invest more in the education system when it is struggling, which it still is in many parts of the United States, or attempting to directly raid the education system in the name of "cutting waste" just so as to throw your constituents a tax cut, I do not care. Ultimately, attacks on the education system invariably come from authoritarian quarters of our political sphere.

Whether you like it or not, then, you are a brainwashed authoritarian, and I do not care what pretenses you choose to paint over it. You are no more intent on "liberating" anybody than Russia was intent on "liberating" Ukraine by flattening any city that resisted them under their jack boot. Calling yourself "libertarian" really does not mean that you give a shit about liberty in any real sense. Calling yourself a liberator does not make you a liberator.

You seem to be mixing up the nature of education with the funding of education. Yes, our schools don't do a good job of teaching critical thinking. That is not a funding issue, it's a focus issue. Throwing money at it won't make kids learn more.

@Loren Pechtel has chosen to blame children for the symptoms of poverty.

You are utterly missing it--we've already pointed out the problem is the parents. Throwing money at the schools does nothing about parents who don't care.

You do not understand this the way that I do. I saw it in action. I saw what was going on in a poor district. I was embroiled in that dysfunction. The fact that I embraced intellectualism as a defense mechanism, out of a sense of desperation to give myself an excuse not to kill myself, does not really change the fact that the system that I came from cannot help but to produce dysfunctional people.

It is always the children's fault from the standpoint of people that have very weak character.

Well, whether you choose to be grateful for it or not, the education system is the best shield that our society has against authoritarianism. Our education system is best weapon we have for defending our liberty. Wherever anti-intellectualism has taken root in our culture, it is imperative, for the survival of liberty, to find allies in those places and to persuade them to stand up for a better way of life.

No, you saw it from a child's perspective--you're not seeing the whole picture. Yes, it's shitty. What you fail to understand is that throwing money at it doesn't help, money can't overcome the real problem.

 

[laughing dog]

@Loren Pechtel Your views are still basically authoritarian. The reason why I accuse you so is that education, especially education in cognitive skills like critical thinking, is the single biggest threat in the world against authoritarian governments. Authoritarianism cannot survive in a world where most people are educated in the kinds of thinking skills that they need in order to solve their own problems in rational ways. When authoritarian politicians get into power, the first thing they do, under whatever pretense they choose to do so, is to attack the education system. Whether you are attacking attempts to invest more in the education system when it is struggling, which it still is in many parts of the United States, or attempting to directly raid the education system in the name of "cutting waste" just so as to throw your constituents a tax cut, I do not care. Ultimately, attacks on the education system invariably come from authoritarian quarters of our political sphere.

Whether you like it or not, then, you are a brainwashed authoritarian, and I do not care what pretenses you choose to paint over it. You are no more intent on "liberating" anybody than Russia was intent on "liberating" Ukraine by flattening any city that resisted them under their jack boot. Calling yourself "libertarian" really does not mean that you give a shit about liberty in any real sense. Calling yourself a liberator does not make you a liberator.

You seem to be mixing up the nature of education with the funding of education. Yes, our schools don't do a good job of teaching critical thinking. That is not a funding issue, it's a focus issue. Throwing money at it won't make kids learn more.

You cannot MAKE people learn. One can only try to induce them to want to learn. That takes skill and possibly more resources.

@Loren Pechtel has chosen to blame children for the symptoms of poverty.

You are utterly missing it--we've already pointed out the problem is the parents. Throwing money at the schools does nothing about parents who don't care.

You do not understand this the way that I do. I saw it in action. I saw what was going on in a poor district. I was embroiled in that dysfunction. The fact that I embraced intellectualism as a defense mechanism, out of a sense of desperation to give myself an excuse not to kill myself, does not really change the fact that the system that I came from cannot help but to produce dysfunctional people.

It is always the children's fault from the standpoint of people that have very weak character.

Well, whether you choose to be grateful for it or not, the education system is the best shield that our society has against authoritarianism. Our education system is best weapon we have for defending our liberty. Wherever anti-intellectualism has taken root in our culture, it is imperative, for the survival of liberty, to find allies in those places and to persuade them to stand up for a better way of life.

No, you saw it from a child's perspective--you're not seeing the whole picture. Yes, it's shitty. What you fail to understand is that throwing money at it doesn't help, money can't overcome the real problem.

No, the real issue is that there is not only one real problem. Money cannot overcome all of the real problems. Money to the schools can overcome some of the real problems.

 

[TSwizzle]

One blatant difference between good schools and bad schools is the level of parental involvement.

And it seems that many schools actually want less parental involvement.

More concerned about "diversity, equity and inclusion" than providing an education some of them.

 

[Trausti]

One blatant difference between good schools and bad schools is the level of parental involvement.

And it seems that many schools actually want less parental involvement.

More concerned about "diversity, equity and inclusion" than providing an education some of them.

Oh, I dunno. Maybe parents would prefer their children learn about the 73 genders and judge others based on skin color than waste time on the quadratic formula.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

One blatant difference between good schools and bad schools is the level of parental involvement.

And it seems that many schools actually want less parental involvement.

Yes, because we all know teachers want parents less involved in their student's education. Where do you get this crap from?

More concerned about "diversity, equity and inclusion" than providing an education some of them.

"Some of them", "many schools", any other vague, unidentifiable, unfalsifiable labels and claims you want to add?

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

We could fix just about every social ill whatsoever with a steep progressive tax, compulsory busing, and a large investment in improvements to the education system.

It's like the 1960s and 1970s never happened. But my favorite memory-holed progressive success is Missouri v. Jenkins, in the 1980s, when a federal court ordered Kansas City to tax, tax, tax, and spend gobs of $$$ on education with the predictable results.

Memory-holed? You don't seem to remember that case well.

 

[Trausti]

We could fix just about every social ill whatsoever with a steep progressive tax, compulsory busing, and a large investment in improvements to the education system.

It's like the 1960s and 1970s never happened. But my favorite memory-holed progressive success is Missouri v. Jenkins, in the 1980s, when a federal court ordered Kansas City to tax, tax, tax, and spend gobs of $$$ on education with the predictable results.

Memory-holed? You don't seem to remember that case well.

The Two Billion Dollar Judge - Claremont Review of Books

claremontreviewofbooks.com

 

[Loren Pechtel]

No, you saw it from a child's perspective--you're not seeing the whole picture. Yes, it's shitty. What you fail to understand is that throwing money at it doesn't help, money can't overcome the real problem.
No, the real issue is that there is not only one real problem. Money cannot overcome all of the real problems. Money to the schools can overcome some of the real problems.

You're not rebutting me.

 

[laughing dog]

No, you saw it from a child's perspective--you're not seeing the whole picture. Yes, it's shitty. What you fail to understand is that throwing money at it doesn't help, money can't overcome the real problem.
No, the real issue is that there is not only one real problem. Money cannot overcome all of the real problems. Money to the schools can overcome some of the real problems.

You're not rebutting me.

Not only did you mess up the quote, but you missed the point of my observation. And I did rebut your straw man position.