Underfunding American Schools...Why Suddenly No Money?

Master of Ossus · Post by **Master of Ossus** » 2004-08-19 08:24pm

Col. Crackpot wrote:cutting athletics is no different than cutting music IMO. Whether you agree or not , they provide avenues of development and expression for students. The comments dismissing athletics as expendable are disturbing and reek of elitism and are no different than uber-jocks dismissing music and the arts.

That's part of why I think that music and arts should be cut, too, as well as after-school activities that don't pay for themselves.

No one in the US is failing tests because of poor after-school sports performances or weak artistic development. People ARE failing because of poor education systems. When you have a choice as to which one gets funding, what're you gonna do?

Master of Ossus · Post by **Master of Ossus** » 2004-08-19 08:29pm

Col. Crackpot wrote:
SirNitram wrote: I'm just looking at national trends, and it's certainly not getting better.
i wouldn't go that far. there are always going to be ebbs and flows, but to say it is worse than 20 or even 10 years ago is a bit of a stretch.

Regardless of whether Creationism is doing particularly well at this particular moment, the fact that it even represents a considerable portion of the population is evidence in and of itself that the science curriculums in many districts are inadequate to provide students with the critical thinking skills they need.

Master of Ossus · Post by **Master of Ossus** » 2004-08-19 08:34pm

Durandal wrote:I have to agree. The whole point of unions is to protect workers from corporations mistreating them, not to gouge employers and the government to obscene levels.

Or, for that matter, the taxpayers.

However, I think that the most serious problem with the unions is not that they force teachers' salaries to be higher than the market rate. The problem is that they remove the ability of a district to pay individual teachers more or less than someone else with equal seniority.

Durandal · Post by **Durandal** » 2004-08-19 08:34pm

Athletics actually bring in a decent chunk of change for schools, especially if the school is doing well. It's a whole lot easier for people to get excited about sports because they can understand what's going on. But how many kids have parents who can actually effectively help them out with their high school math or science homework?

Master of Ossus · Post by **Master of Ossus** » 2004-08-19 08:41pm

Durandal wrote:Athletics actually bring in a decent chunk of change for schools, especially if the school is doing well.

Evidence? Only a very few HS's manage to make money on their sports programs, and usually they only manage to do that if they ignore expenditures like the costs of facilities. In college, the ONLY sports that EVER make profits are football and occasionally basketball for really big Division I schools. Sports like volleyball can't pay for the courts they play on.

It's a whole lot easier for people to get excited about sports because they can understand what's going on. But how many kids have parents who can actually effectively help them out with their high school math or science homework?

Not too many, and even though I could probably easily help my hypothetical son/daughter with their classwork through HS I still wouldn't be excited about it. That doesn't mean that I should stop funding my child's education.

tharkûn · Post by **tharkûn** » 2004-08-19 08:43pm

The sorry truth of the matter is kids simply do not want to learn. When all these kids from "underfunded" high schools where they didn't learn didly squat get to college where they pay their own way manage to get impressively good education for significantly less per pupil. Community college should not cost significantly less per pupil than highschool and being significantly more effective. Yet it does and is for the simple reason that way too much time in highschool is devoted to BS and idiots who want nothing to do with education.

Frankly though I find it amazing that American schools are still "underfunded", in 1961 3.6% of American GDP went into K-12; in 2001 that number has gone up to 4.5% of GDP. In terms of adjusted dollars total funding has gone up 23 fold while the total population has gone up around 160%. Now maybe education back in 1960 sucked major ass and I'm unaware of it; but seriously how do you tell when you have enough funding? Is it going to be enough when we have double the current level of funding? Or do we only need a 50% increase?

I mean seriously a 14 fold increase in funding per pupil aught to be showing some results. Which is why I am far more inclined to blame other factors. Personally I think the problem is much deeper than funding for schools it reaches into kids not giving a damn, their parents not being involved in their education, the ever increasing costs of security, the massive epidemic of "sue the school" to reach deep pockets, the political BS in the school, the declining quality of teachers, the illicit drug trade ... The problem, in my view, isn't that eduction doesn't get enough money. but rather that so much money has to be spent on external problems and is used inefficiently.

Frankly without solving the underlying problems, shoveling just a slight bit more cash into the problem isn't going to help all that much. No amount of money can take the place of treating education as an oppurtunity and privilige instead of an obligation and a chore.

Durandal · Post by **Durandal** » 2004-08-19 09:13pm

In the 60's, there was a huge emphasis on math and science in K-12 because of the space race. That emphasis has since gone away because now being bad at math, science, English and history doesn't mean you're dumb, it just means you're good at something else (football), and that's okay too. At the heart of it, it's this kind of anti-intellectualism that is responsible for the failing education system. Since no one can be unintelligent now, any activity which anyone can possibly be good at must be considered just as important as more challenging activities, math and science receive funding disproportionate to their usefulness.

MKSheppard · Post by **MKSheppard** » 2004-08-19 09:36pm

Durandal wrote:That emphasis has since gone away because now being bad at math, science, English and history doesn't mean you're dumb, it just means you're good at something else (football), and that's okay too. At the heart of it, it's this kind of anti-intellectualism that is responsible for the failing education system.

Actually no. What's responsible for our failing educational system is
the horrid bullshit that's being squeezed into it. There needs to be
a much smoother flow of classwork. No more bullshit like having
to read an entire book outloud in class for English, that makes us
finish a book that could be done in a week, stretch for mooooooonths.

Cut that crap out, and you gain months' worth of classroom time with
out any need to extend the schoolyear, and of course, get teachers
worth a damn, drop the no-load idiots from the classes and dump them
in the idiot classes where only basic shit is taught.

99% of the kids at school can be taught efficiently - it's the 1% of fuckwits
who hold the other 99% back. Dump them, and watch classroom efficincy
skyrocket.

As for anti-intellectualism, you're being too damn elitist here;
not everyone can be a child prodigy in every area; my best subject
in school consistently was history, and I always struggled through
math. The emphasis should be on helping the students identify
what they are good at and working to ensure that they have a
basic competency in what they are not good at.

There also needs to be a turn away from athlete-students to student-athletes. De-emphasize intraschool sports, and make
physical education fucking mandatory to ensure everyone at
least gets a workout everyday.

Durandal · Post by **Durandal** » 2004-08-19 11:53pm

MKSheppard wrote:Actually no. What's responsible for our failing educational system is the horrid bullshit that's being squeezed into it. There needs to be a much smoother flow of classwork. No more bullshit like having to read an entire book outloud in class for English, that makes us finish a book that could be done in a week, stretch for mooooooonths.

Um, at what level of schooling are you referring to? The last time I remember having to read an entire book out loud was 6th grade.

Cut that crap out, and you gain months' worth of classroom time with out any need to extend the schoolyear, and of course, get teachers worth a damn, drop the no-load idiots from the classes and dump them in the idiot classes where only basic shit is taught.

99% of the kids at school can be taught efficiently - it's the 1% of fuckwits who hold the other 99% back. Dump them, and watch classroom efficincy skyrocket.

Agreed. However, as I said before, that 1% isn't stupid anymore. They're just good at other things nowadays. In the 60's, if you didn't work your ass off, you failed. That was it.

As for anti-intellectualism, you're being too damn elitist here; not everyone can be a child prodigy in every area; my best subject in school consistently was history, and I always struggled through math. The emphasis should be on helping the students identify what they are good at and working to ensure that they have a basic competency in what they are not good at.

And, as I noted before, history is one of the primarily important subjects. When taught properly, history teaches critical analysis and predictive skills. History is a perfectly legitimate academic pursuit. I don't necessarily think it's anywhere near as difficult as math or science (where there is one correct answer, and only one correct answer, at least at the high school level), but it is an important field of study.

There also needs to be a turn away from athlete-students to student-athletes. De-emphasize intraschool sports, and make physical education fucking mandatory to ensure everyone at least gets a workout everyday.

What schools need are checks and balances. What Alyrium commented on is a big problem: teachers padding athletes' grades with a wink so that they can play.

Post by **Alyrium Denryle** » 2004-08-19 11:56pm

Um, at what level of schooling are you referring to? The last time I remember having to read an entire book out loud was 6th grade.

I was forced to do so up through my SENIOR YEAR. Though, I got back at my english teacher through 15 page hightly technical essays... And in class yoda speak

Spice Runner · Post by **Spice Runner** » 2004-08-20 12:30am

I remember from highschool reading books outloud in class. Also the bullshit simpleminded waste of time assignments and projects. There were always idiots in all my classes who didn't want to learn anything and they held back the whole class. It would have really made a difference had they been seperated from the rest of the class.

Quadlok · Post by **Quadlok** » 2004-08-20 12:51am

In my entire American English class my Junior year, we read all of two (short) books for class, and a bunch of poems. These were written almost universally by minority women in the past half century. This is what you get if your teacher is a touchy-feely, new age, feminazi.

Interestingly enough, the only teachers of mine in highschool who I actually felt were trying to teach in the traditional sense, were military men. The rest either gave away grades or couldn't design a decent course if their life depended on it.

Alan Bolte · Post by **Alan Bolte** » 2004-08-20 01:17am

Master of Ossus wrote:However, I think that the most serious problem with the unions is not that they force teachers' salaries to be higher than the market rate. The problem is that they remove the ability of a district to pay individual teachers more or less than someone else with equal seniority.

Alright then, here's a question for you: how do we change this situation? I don't mean us here, of course, but rather, what sort of changes in legislation should we support? What else might be effective in terms of policy changes?

I don't think you can outlaw teacher's unions entirely, and that would likely create a bad situation in the long run anyway. I don't see how they could be negotiated with, on the basic terms of 'this is best for the schools'; that would be less likely to succede than the idea of changing policy in the first place. So what else?

Post by **Mr Bean** » 2004-08-20 02:18am

Hiring situation

Consider a anectodal bit
My High Schoo Psychology teacher was a double Master degree holder(Contemporary History or some such and Criminal Psy) with a bacholors degree in Math(don't know what sub)
He taught Psy, History and Math, only teacher who taught eight classes a day, showed up earily and left late giving him a 11-13 hour work day each day and his classiese were damn INTRESTING at all times, I never had him for Math but his History and Psy classes kicked ass(He also like to mess around, he told us Day 1 never tell him about anything that was already in the classroom when we care as he should sure as hell notice before we did and we should not waste his time telling him, which made it kind of fun sitting in a completly TPed classroom with the desked glued upsidedown on the floor and try and pretend nothings wrong as we sit on the floor that day)

My high school Math teacher did not graduate Collage, she got a teching certification via a Distance service,
She also was fired from three diffrent jobs for incomptence, (Two jobs as cashiers both times fired because the books never matched up, and when they docked her pay it was even more off) And a third job which I myself can verify was that she was fire for Gross incomptance was when she managed to burn down the local McDonalds and made the local papers
Two and a half years later she showed up teaching my Junior year Math class via the brilliant tatic of reading strait from the teacher edition then filling the rest of the class with worksheets full of problems to keep us distracted

Master of Ossus · Post by **Master of Ossus** » 2004-08-20 03:16am

Alan Bolte wrote:Alright then, here's a question for you: how do we change this situation? I don't mean us here, of course, but rather, what sort of changes in legislation should we support? What else might be effective in terms of policy changes?

I don't think you can outlaw teacher's unions entirely, and that would likely create a bad situation in the long run anyway. I don't see how they could be negotiated with, on the basic terms of 'this is best for the schools'; that would be less likely to succede than the idea of changing policy in the first place. So what else?

Even if you don't want to eliminate the teachers' unions altogether (which needs to be done, regardless), then you should create a pay-scale for teachers that's based mainly on an incentive-based system, so top-performing teachers get better pay than shitty ones. It would be trivially easy to establish such a system off of standardized tests that already exist, and while not being perfect, it would go far to bring professionals into teaching and cutting dead-weight instructors from classrooms.

It's also extraordinarily easy to show how this would benefit schools. Not that the unions would go for it, since their job is to protect the worst teachers, but fuck them. If they didn't go for this, it would basically be an admission that they don't care about the best interests of the kids at all (which they already admit regularly), and would hopefully cripple their political strength.

Durandal · Post by **Durandal** » 2004-08-20 11:26am

MrBean wrote:(He also like to mess around, he told us Day 1 never tell him about anything that was already in the classroom when we care as he should sure as hell notice before we did and we should not waste his time telling him, which made it kind of fun sitting in a completly TPed classroom with the desked glued upsidedown on the floor and try and pretend nothings wrong as we sit on the floor that day)

Anyone get that?

Rogue 9 · Post by **Rogue 9** » 2004-08-20 11:41am

99% of the kids at school can be taught efficiently - it's the 1% of fuckwits who hold the other 99% back. Dump them, and watch classroom efficincy skyrocket.

I can attest to this. I remember class being stalled for a week at a time multiple times because Ted Dilger was too retarded to bother himself to sit down, shut up, and stop derailing the class by intentionally asking the teacher to explain the bloody obvious, with a shit-eating grin on his face that made you know he didn't give a damn and was just trying to delay long enough to avoid homework...

J · Post by J » 2004-08-20 12:51pm

Alyrium Denryle wrote:It is a cultural issue that elevates athletics and physical acheivment over intellectual accomplishments in this country. For example, I have watched atheletes walk up to teachers and simply ask that their grades be padded so they can continue playing, and have it given to them. While I still had to actually do the work. It is rather sickening

What really drove home the importance of athletics in America was when several US universities sent me full scholarship packages in hopes of recruiting me to swim for their teams. At the time I was a top 10 swimmer in Canada and not one of the universities I applied to in my country offered any financial aid for swimming (they gave me academic scholarships though).

It's quite sickening in a way, both my sister and myself were straight A students in highschool and scored highly on the SATs, and yet not a single US university we applied to bothered to give us an academic scholarship, but their athletics departments were happy to pay for everything provided we swim for them. In Canada it was the other way around, we got academic as opposed to athletic handouts.

Post by **Cairber** » 2004-08-20 12:56pm

Your story about sports being more important than academics reminds me of my American Writers I class at Villanova. Our teacher often asked up to read aloud (now this reading aloud is because many of these pieces were written in essay form only after they were speeches, thus they were meant to be heard). We had 2 basketball players in our class. One of them could not read his piece without help from the teacher on moderate words...like..."moderate." The other player, from germany, was amazing when he read. Emerson would have been proud.

It annoyed me because I know that first player was on full scholarship but I had a high SAt and straight As, I ended up double majoring and graduating cum laude. Yet I had to pay my way through (and I will be paying for a lOOOONNNG time).

But then part of me knows the amount of money BBall brings to villanova...its a tough situation

Durandal · Post by **Durandal** » 2004-08-20 03:11pm

Universities are educational institutions, and basketball will never be a valid major. The very idea of an athletic scholarship, when the word "scholarship" refers to scholarly achievement, is really just fucked up.

Seriously, why don't they just drop athletic scholarships and offer every student who plays for the team a degree? It doesn't even have to be a degree in anything, but for the sake of argument, let's just hand them communications degrees ("It is joke major, I know!"). They don't have to go to class; they just have to play sports, and they get a free degree in a worthless subject to prove just how much work they did when they were in school.

Rogue 9 · Post by **Rogue 9** » 2004-08-20 03:13pm

They don't have to go to class; they just have to play sports, and they get a free degree in a worthless subject to prove just how much work they did when they were in school.

Because, believe it or not, not all college athletes are worthless slackers.

Master of Ossus · Post by **Master of Ossus** » 2004-08-20 03:14pm

Durandal wrote:Universities are educational institutions, and basketball will never be a valid major. The very idea of an athletic scholarship, when the word "scholarship" refers to scholarly achievement, is really just fucked up.

Seriously, why don't they just drop athletic scholarships and offer every student who plays for the team a degree? It doesn't even have to be a degree in anything, but for the sake of argument, let's just hand them communications degrees ("It is joke major, I know!"). They don't have to go to class; they just have to play sports, and they get a free degree in a worthless subject to prove just how much work they did when they were in school.

Many schools do these things, anyway. University of Cincinatti's basketball team hasn't graduated a single player in decades! They're not bothering to go to school. They're just there to play sports.

Durandal · Post by **Durandal** » 2004-08-20 03:41pm

Rogue 9 wrote:
They don't have to go to class; they just have to play sports, and they get a free degree in a worthless subject to prove just how much work they did when they were in school.
Because, believe it or not, not all college athletes are worthless slackers.

They're getting a full ride, courtesy of the tax payers, based on extraneous merits. If my school gives me a full-ride scholarship because I'm a super-swell guy, I might reconsider my position. If private foundations want to hand out $40,000 scholarships because some kid can play basketball pretty well, fine. But those kinds of handouts have no place coming from an educational institution. Schools shouldn't be lining up to beg for some kid out of high school.

If all you're going to do is go to university to play basketball, then you shouldn't even bother going to class. All those people do is waste everyone's time and take up a free seat in the lecture hall.

Rogue 9 · Post by **Rogue 9** » 2004-08-20 03:43pm

Yeah, I'll agree with that. I think I'd misunderstood where you were coming from at first.

Durandal · Post by **Durandal** » 2004-08-20 03:47pm

Rogue 9 wrote:Yeah, I'll agree with that. I think I'd misunderstood where you were coming from at first.

Just to clarify, I don't care if someone goes to university, works toward a degree, and plays sports in his free time. I object to Big Ten institutions practically sucking high school senior athletes' cocks by offering them ludicrous scholarships to come and play for their schools. I similarly object to coaches at universities getting paid as much as a full order of magnitude more than professors for not even contributing to the university's primary purpose.

EDIT: I believe there was a movement a while back by college athletes to get salaries. The sheer gall of these people just amazes me sometimes. Many of them already get stipends, for Christ's sake.