Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire If you don't spend enough tax-payer money on schools - this follows

It's not that we don't spend enough on education, it's that we don't spend enough on teaching students. Cut the top heavy admins, cut the weak teachers, reward the good.

What he said

+1

The best scores come from places where a person has to really hustle to get by and maybe excel. Not the case in the USA. Rarely does a white anglo saxon protestant
win our spelling bee.

Mike 762 said:
Quality of instruction and curricula, combined with student and parental participation are the determining factor, not total tax dollars spent.

Throw in discipline by the administrators and parents and remove the political correctness he would be absolutely correct. kwg

Motivated Parents in this state have pulled their children and are homeschooling them. Why?

Because Public Education has alienated those it needs most--dedicated parents.

Religious Student Groups and Boy Scouts have been banned, along with supportive parents and mentors who volunteered.

Districts have abandoned "shop" classes declaring them "less important" (but not to the Mechanic who would volunteer to help in his son's class.

The list goes on, but dedicated parents who disagree with the school's "intelligentsia" have been sent away. Their tax dollars went with them.

BMT

The gov't cannot define "good" -- much less reward it. Rewarding "results" over-simplifies the problem. End entitlement and welfare. You want results -- no drivers license, no unemployment payments, no welfare, no benefits unless you have a diploma or are performing as expected in school. No SSI disability payments for Exceptional Children unless they are unable to attend school. . .

Money isn't that answer. We spend enough money on education in this country to have every kid driven to school in a chauffeured driven limousine and feed them steak and caviar three times a day.

The main problem is liberalism and liberal parents who think all they have to do is provide sperm and egg and that's it. There are only so many hours in a day to teach a kid something and when 2/3rds of the day is spent teaching liberal religion there isn't much time to teach the three R's.

The second problem is mainstreaming problem and stupid kids with the regular kids. When you do that the curriculum has to be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator, thereby, leaving the bright kids behind. Putting a rotten apple into a barrel of sweet apples is not going to make the rotten apple taste better. All it will do is make the sweet apples taste rotten.

And last but not least, we need to put teachers back into the class room and get rid of educators. Alas, that can't happen until we get rid of the religion of liberalism.

the New Orleans schools, which were in a race with DC to see who could be the worst, despite per pupil spending higher than that of our Canuck brethren, were famously all shut down by the storm.

what has emerged from the wreckage is mostly charter schools, spending less per pupil, and educating more. the gigiantic sclerotic bureaucracy that used to steal or waste millions of dollars is gone....and I'm not exaggerating, we've got board members and admin staff doing federal time for it.

the charter schools run themselves, and answer only to the state accreditation people. it ain't money that solves education problems, or else the DC public schools would be cranking out Rhodes scholars by the thousands.

Perhaps we are lucky in B.C. - and in Canada.

Here public schools are accountable to locally elected school boards - which are in turn accountable to the Provincial legislatures.

Education is not a federal jurisdiction - in Canada.

Here parents are in "the loop" - in a real and significant way.

This is, of course, how it should be.

What he said.
In Anchorage we spend >$15,000 per kid and the local Christian school spends about $5000 and blow away the public schools. I think someone else hit on lack of parent involvement too.

Wook

No teachers unions in Canada?

Of course taxpayer money will be needed but not for social engineering and birth control to name just 2.

Stop all the touchy feely "everybody is a winner" crap and stress only academics and teaching them HOW to learn. Make em Schools, not social gatherings, DO NOT tolerate bad or disruptive behavior, stress basic skills in the three "R's", bring back industrial arts & home economics (not every kid is gonna be a white collar worker). Move pupils up the ladder based on their achievements, yep, some will be left in the dust but that is how life works.

No child left behind is a BS "feel good" piece of crap. Make them earn it, that is how life works.

Here in Helena more and more parents are pulling their kids from the public schools and putting them Christian private schools or homeschooling them. At the rate we are going in a decade the only kids going to public schools are going to be the stupid, problem kids, and public school teacher kids. |Liberalism is killing public schools because liberals do not educate their kids they expect the schools to do it.

Yes there are teachers unions in Canada - I belong to one. It is a powerful Province-wide union.

We do a good job, we are well rewarded for it. In comparisons to the rest of Canada, and the rest of the world, we always seem to rank highly.

I'd say it's the high degree of co-operation and transparency between the school boards, the administrators, the parents and the teachers that enables this success.

Believe me - there are bad parents on every side of the political spectrum. We have as many problems with brain-dead red-neck conservative parents as we do with brain-dead liberal hippy parents.Bad parenting knows no political boundaries.

The problem isn't related to the parents politics - only their commitment to being active and involved in their own kid's lives and education.

Flat tax
4 Rs
Civics

Cut everything else out completely.

BTW - OPs income is derived from tax dollars extorted from other people, so go from there....

The same seems to be true everywhere. I read that in New York State catholic schools get about $5,000 per student but they don't waste a bunch of it on excess administrators. If you figure a 30 student class in the public schools at $14,119 per student, it costs $423,570 for that class. The teacher, with benefits, is somewhere in the $75,000 to $80,000 range. Most of the rest goes to administration.

Brian,
It warms my heart that you are so concerned about the quality of education in our country. Or, was it just supposed to be a dig at us?

the New Orleans public schools were accountable to an elected school board, they just happened to be crooks. and between the teachers union and the administrative bureaucracy, a huge amount of money was wasted and stolen.

the charter schools are run by the parents whose kids attend them.....they perform or the kids go to another school the parents like better, or they fire the administrator and get another one.

no union contracts. no tenure.

Nonsense. In a democracy it is only taxation - WITHOUT REPRESENTATION - that is ever a problem.

In a democracy - if the MAJORITY of the people want the services that higher taxes can provide - it's not "extortion" - it's called DEMOCRACY.

If the majority of the people want higher taxes - for more services - it is their democratic right for governments to listen to them - and give them what they want. In a democracy - we don't always get what WE want - we get what the MAJORITY of the people want.

It's an imperfect system - but it's the best one yet devised.

Because this country was originally set up as a Republic, not a democracy!