Teachers in Portland, Oregon, went on strike Wednesday, shuttering school for some 45,000 students in Oregon’s biggest city
To me, the fact that not just teachers but students don’t have access to abundant school supplies at their schools is beyond the pale.
We have starved public education to death to continue to fund war and cut rich sociopath’s taxes.
This is a worthless garbage country with perverse incentives. If we aren’t willing to fund the most core of societal structures, like educating the future adults of society, we should collapse so something of worth can be built. We aren’t a society, we’re just a gold plated labor camp.
It’s a sad truth but citizens don’t care about our schools. I heard an old joke once, “I don’t know who this poor Levi guy is but he can’t ever get elected” Obviously referring to school levies. School shouldn’t be funded by local property taxes. It hurts kids who are born in poorer districts and rewards those kids born in wealthy ones.
Amen, I think private schools for non medically specific populations (autism, sensory disabilities, etc) should be illegal as well. As it is we have:
A) Public schools in complete ruin for the poor kids with busy working parents that don’t have time to enter charter lotteries. Glorified daycare where hope goes to die.
B) the trojan horse charter schools meant to hand the funding for public ed to the greedy oligarchs. Most of these indoctrinate kids with right-wing lunacy. They are marketed as an escape hatch for middle class parents with some time to advocate for their kids while starving our public school’s funding further, by design. “muh free market makes everything better” while sociopaths get richer standard American bullshit. This is designed to siphon any middle class complainers with any means away from the public ed funding fight, leaving fewer advocates for the public education system to rebuild it from its present ruin.
C) The owner’s kids private schools, where they learn they are humans who will control and exploit all the subhuman poorie livestock. They will be taught this sociopathic behavior is benevolent and the natural order.
All of these children should be FORCED, yes FORCED, by force of law to go to to the same public schools depending on their area. If we wanted a society, all the socio-economic statuses would be FORCED to have their children socialize and realize none of them intrinsically deserve Moooooooooore than the other kids. We already mandate education for children as we should, this isn’t a big ask. Rich people just demand their kids to get a better education than yours to keep the game nice and rigged generationally on every front.
It will never happen because the owners don’t want it to and propagandize their cattle not to want it either, but it would need to happen for us to one day become a society. As it is, rich kids don’t talk to poor kids, so they have no problem as rich adults hurting faceless poor people for another dollar. Any psychogist will tell you, empathy must be learned from a young age, and the US goes to extremes to avoid teaching it at all. We prefer “fuck you whether or not I got mine.”
If it did happen, our public schools would be funded, rebuilt shiny and chrome, with school supplies exploding out of the roof so fucking fast you’d think you were magically teleported to Norway.
It’s not that schools shouldn’t be funded by property tax, it’s that the revenue collected should be pooled and distributed equitably among the state’s public schools. Cincinnati OH does it this way (they call it “funding where you learn, not where you live”) so it’s possible with enough political will.
deleted by creator
K-12 needs pencils, markers, pens, construction paper, regular paper, notebooks, assignment folders, erasers, pencil sharpeners, call it what you want but books with text kids need to read when they get home, art supplies because yes art is important to development, and most actual developed nations unlike our gold plated shithole also provides technology like tablets or laptops of some kind to their kids, not just their rich kids at the right schools.
If your point is that we should race to the bottom and provide the cheapest possible nuts and bolts education devoid of any curriculum not directly tied to becoming an efficient wage slave by eliminating any creative expression in K-12, I would contend that such a society isn’t worth existing and those kids would be better off dead than to be taught their very lives exist solely in service to our beloved economy.
deleted by creator
Apologies, your lead in made me jump to an incorrect conclusion about your motives.
There’s sadly a lot of very vocal people who would claim all a kid needs are bootstraps and a can-do attitude, and if they don’t succeed in life despite every obstacle in their way, they deserve their suffering somehow for making “bad decisions.”
deleted by creator
There would be so much more funding for education if the school system didn’t waste it on proprietary software and copyrighted materials.
Oh well. At least the businesses are happy.
What alternatives would you recommend?
Total support from up North in Washington State.
Union Proud!
So what ARE class sizes in Oregon?
I found this article from 2018 that says:
The [union negotiated] thresholds are 24 students for kindergarten classes, 26 for grades 1 to 3, and 28 for grades 4 to 5. For middle and high schools, the thresholds limit how many students teachers may see in a day: 150, or 220 for performance classes, for middle school; and 160, or 225 for performance classes, for high school.
That’s a better teacher to student ratio than I had growing up in what was considered a good school district.
The article talks about how class sizes can rise from there they just have to pay the teachers 3% more. It also depends on the students themselves. A couple or a single aggressive kid(s) can make a class spiral out of control.
deleted by creator
And yet, this country has billions of dollars to fund wars.
Federalism at its finest /s
