Government Schools Are a Jobs Program for Unions (Dumb, unteachable Democrats)

Can we finally dispense with the fiction that the American public 
education system is anything but a jobs program for low achievers?

Yes, we all have fond memories of some teacher or another from our days 
in school. Back in the day, the public school system was an elevator 
into the middle class, although it was never as good as we would like to 
think. For every good teacher there were 4 mediocre ones and at least 
one really bad one.

But at least you could count on anybody graduating from a public school 
to have a good grasp of basic mathematics, the ability to read and 
write, and a reasonable sense of how our Constitutional order works. In 
other words, the public schools served their function. We weren't trying 
to create intellectuals but rather people prepared to be good, 
productive citizens who could climb the social and economic ladder.

Frankly, we don't need that many intellectuals anyway. Recent history 
shows that overproducing intellectuals--especially those of modest 
intelligence--is a net negative for society.


Public schools no longer serve their basic function--at least not where 
it counts. Middle and upper-class kids will get a decent education no 
matter what, as long as their parents want them to. Any decent 
teacher--and there are still more than a few--knows that parental 
involvement is the most important variable in student achievement. 
Plenty of kids could skip school and spend time reading at home and 
practicing mathematics and come out more prepared for life than a public 
school kid, provided their parents ensured they put in the work.

Talk to any home school kid, and you will wonder what they do in public 
schools all day. These kids can learn more in 2-3 hours a day with their 
parents than kids who go to school all day.

COVID-era policies stripped the veil away. Parents got to see how awful 
public schools are, and school choice took off. Parents from 
disadvantaged areas have wanted a choice for a long time but were 
stymied by powerful unions and politicians who were able to tap into 
middle-class nostalgia for their time in school.


The entire city of Chicago is now run by the public school 
mafia--Brandon Johnson, the Mayor, was a union leader there. And it is a 
disaster, as are the schools themselves.

Thousands of people have been hired at the Chicago Public Schools over 
the past few years, fueled by $2.8 billion in federal covid relief 
funding. Now the money is gone, but no one wants to reduce the 
workforce, and an ugly budget fight has plunged one of the nation’s 
largest districts into a financial and leadership crisis.

The new teachers, aides and school nurses, officials say, were 
desperately needed even before the pandemic extracted a severe toll on 
the city’s children. But no one in the district has a plan for how to 
keep paying them.

The mayor is pressuring the school system to consider a $300 million 
high-interest loan to cover short-term expenses, and he’s tried to oust 
the schools chief, who won’t go along. The teachers union is fighting 
any cuts while also pushing for new hires and big raises. This month, 
the school board resigned en masse rather than fire — or back up — the 
chief.

The public schools DESPERATELY needed more employees, we are told, 
because the schools suck eggs. This is the perfect government solution, 
one of the only places in the world where we reward failure with more 
resources. The worse you do the more money flows your way.

We incentivize failure.

“This is what it looks like when you burn a district down,” said 
Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University. 
“It is a level of dysfunction that feels beyond destabilizing, enough to 
make people lose confidence in the system.”

Soon after the federal government approved a historic $190 billion in 
covid relief funds for schools, experts warned school districts across 
the country that it would be risky to use the one-time funding for 
ongoing expenses. Some districts opted to spend their money on discrete 
projects, such as improving facilities or contracts with tutoring 
companies. But others, including Chicago Public Schools, said the need 
for new staff was acute. For years, the system has been underfunded, and 
the district saw an opportunity to rectify that.

Schools are always underfunded, we are told, but that is a lie. As 
enrollment declines employment goes up, and it's not even teachers that 
get hired. Schools are trying to become a one-stop shop for ruining kids 
lives, and at least in that they are doing a great job. They are pushing 
kids to become alphabet activists, anti-semites, and global warming 
activists.



All of this is unfolding as the district negotiates a new contract with 
the Chicago Teachers Union, which has proposed annual 9 percent raises 
and hiring new staff — totaling more than $10 billion over four years, 
the district says. The district countered with 4 to 5 percent annual 
raises. None of these expenses are in the current budget.

The union and the mayor say that Martinez has not tried hard enough to 
get the state of Illinois to provide extra money, as some other states 
have done for their schools. Under a previously negotiated agreement, 
the state’s school spending is rising each year, but not enough to cover 
the end of the federal funding.

America has always, and for good reason, been dedicated to ensuring that 
every child gets educated. It is good for society and good for the 
citizens. You can't be ignorant and climb the ladder. You need to be 
able to do math and read, and no society can long succeed with a 
population that is a rabble and not able to think clearly.


These days, though, our public schools are often not places where 
education is a high priority. There are good public schools, of course, 
which generally serve affluent parents who willingly vote for higher 
taxes in exchange for performance. But even these schools are beginning 
to fail as the next generation of teachers are poorly educated themselves.

The system is broken, even if not all schools are. And there is no good 
way to reform the system without putting it at risk. School choice is a 
good first step.

The public schools are Boeing. School choice will give us a flourishing 
SpaceX alternative.

https://hotair.com/david-strom/2024/10/22/government-schools-are-a-jobs-program-for-unions-n3796115