money for schools useful or not?
can failing schools really be fixed with money? its true “rich” schools generally perform better, but if you look at many schools in Eastern Europe or Southeast Asia, most of them receive very little state funding compared to American public schools, yet their students turn out more educated than most American students who graduate from public schools. they don’t use shiny new textbooks with colorful pictures or have computers in every classroom or any special technology. a graphing calculator is almost unheard of in some places.
i think instead of always trying to solve this problem with money, we need to teach students to actually want to learn. and if their schools aren’t teaching, then they should know where to go for alternative methods of learning. in short, I think the problem here is societal/cultural, not neccessarily financial.
jcamp, youre right. its run by government.
fern, in an non-capitalist society, what motivation is there to even get an education? why work if there is welfare? in capitalism you dont need a rich public school to succeed, there are other ways, and those who really want it can succeed. those who dont, generally wont.
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about 1 year ago
Public schools in America only teach stupidity.
about 1 year ago
Failing schools can’t be fixed by throwing money at it. My wife is a teacher and does one heck of a job doing it. She had the highest scores from her students out of pretty much her entire district. Not all teachers are bad and not all students are smart. Here’s SOME good news to hear for once though:
http://www.kfyi.com/pages/local_news.html?feed=118695&article=2398275
about 1 year ago
In a capatilist country it is about the money. Maybe not so much as spending on schools, but for attracting the best and brighest to the profession. As long as the market system in this country is the driving force behind all of societies wants and needs, the education problem will persist. It’s all about the money, and that’s the biggest problem.
about 1 year ago
I agree that the problem is more cultural than financial, but you can’t blame the kids for not wanting to learn…if their parents aren’t teaching them ANYTHING at home (by this I mean important things you don’t learn about in public school – nutrition, money management, sexual health…) the kids don’t care about education, because no one has taught the how important it is. Also, in the US, school (or education) is viewed as something you need you need to get through in order to start your life…instead of a lifelong process (that starts at home – before you start school). However, I don’t think the solution is to cut a school’s funding based on standardized test scores. It is a well known fact that they don’t measure intelligence, only how good you are at taking standardized tests. By doing this, our “public” school system is creating a mold of the kind children they want to educate, and if you don’t happen to fit, you’re outta luck. I don’t know what the solution is, but this isn’t it. I have 2 kids – 3 years and 6 months – and I’m only sending them to school for the social skills. I started teaching my 3 year old sign language at 11 months, now he has a HUGE vocabulary, he can spell his whole name in sign language, knows all 50 states and where they are on the map, and so much more.
about 1 year ago
Public Schools could have all the money in the world, and yet I doubt the quality of education would get much better… this is becasue public schools are a government enabled, union run monopoly.
Monopolies almost always produce bad results, because no competition creates complacency… yet it’s even worse in government run monopolies, because they are completely protected from fail, and protected from any possibility of competition (yes, private schools are allowed to compete with public schools, but public schools know that only the richest families can send students to private schools, and therefore are insulated from competiton). Throw unions that prevent bad, or even dangerous, teachers from being fired, into the mix and you’ve got yourself a recipe for disaster.
If you don’t believe that monopolies are bad, I suggest you take a look at some industries where monopolies exist… in days gone by AT&T had a government enabled monopoly on the telecommunications industry. It was a time when phone calls were expensive, espically long distance calls, no answering machines were allowed, and most of the time you actually had to rent your telephone from the telephone company! Then the government broke up the monopoly that they had forced on the public in the first place, and things improved. Today the telephone companies face more competition than ever, what with competing companies in the traditional telephone industry, and new alternatives such as cell phones, and VOIP service. Today you can get such novel services as caller ID, voice mail, video phones, call waiting, and so on… things that were unimaginable with the monopoly system… and calls keep getting cheaper and cheaper.
Monopolies are bad, however, if that monopoly is government run, it is even worse! Case in point, Amtrak… many people actually do not know that Amtrak is the only passenger rail service in the United States, and it is owned by the US federal government. Even fewer know why it is a government owned monopoly. Many think it is because passenger rail service was unable to compete with airplanes, busses, and private automobiles, and because of the altruism of the federal government we are able to ride the rails still. This could not be farther from the truth. The truth is that for many years there were numerous rail roads providing passenger and cargo rail service accross the country and they were very profitable… however because of varying rates for passenger rail tickets, people encouraged the US government to become involved in regulating the passenger rail system. The government passed laws that did two things, first it required rail roads to set the cost of a ticket below a certain level, and secondly it required all rail roads to provide passenger service, including those who otherwise would only wish to carry cargo. The combination of these two restrictions hurt the rail road industry horribly. Companies, because of the limit on ticket price, were unable to make a reasonable profit on passenger service, and they were unable to concentrate on the only area they could make a profit, cargo. This caused many rail roads to go bankrupt. So the remaining rail roads were more than happy in 1971 when the federal government, in an illconceved attempt to fix the problem they created, created Amtrak. Amtrak was designed to alleviate the private rail roads from the burdeon they imposed on the industry, by allowing private rail roads to concentrate on the profitable cargo rail service, while the nationalized Amtrak would concentrate on passenger service. Today, it is illegal for any other rail road company to offer passenger service, much like it is illegal for any other company to deliver the mail besides the US Post Office! Not supprisingly, and much to the socialists’ chagrin, Amtrak is poorly run, fares are expensive, the employees are rude, the trains rarely run on time, and in many cases the trains do not run where people want them. Not supprisingly ridership numbers are rather low, expically when compaired to ridership numbers in places like Europe, and Japan. Yet more proof that government enabled monopolies always produce poor results… yet another industry killed by the good intentions of the federal government and socialism.
But I digress, the way to fix schools is to create a voucher program, wherin parents and students would be able to choose the schools their children could go to. Competition would reduce the cost of education and, most importantly, vastly improve the quality of education in America! How long can we go on with failing schools and believe that everything is alright? How long can we throw money at public schools with no results before we wise up and try a better approach? School vouchers are an idea whose time has come… they came many years ago in places like Belgium, with positive results. Why should American studens sufffer with a bad system when students in Belgium have such good education?