I have always had a special place in my heart for the deceptive simplicity of the Far Side. Box > Sketch > Punchline. The style, to which I have done no real justice here, was distinct, and the punchlines never failed to make me laugh. I seem to recall large portions of my bulletin board being covered with the strips as I grew up.
It also gave me an excuse to use the phrase “Winter of Protest” which is how the kids are summing up the goings on in the Middle East, I guess. It doesn’t seem accurate as I suspect these protests are going to reach far beyond winter.
Not just the Middle East, but in Wisconsin right here in the U.S. of A., too.
Very, very true, though I’ve been try not to equate the protests in the States with those in the Middle East.
However, what’s going on in Wisconsin is tremendously important for those of us Stateside as if this state is allowed to simply wipe away the rights of its workers to collectively bargain, we can expect the same to happen in the other 48 in short order which would yield yet another victory for the side of corporatism…
…and this is from someone who is generally on the side opposite the unions!
In Indiana the gubner is trying to do the same thing, more or less. But he is taking it further by lots of crazy things. Eliminate collective bargaining (with a few limitations) after having already capped property taxes at 1% (the primary method for funding schools), implementing a performance based teaching salary system (this is seriously messed up and misguided), adding duties such as suicide prevention and having schools train teachers as cops so they don’t have to pay for security (for real), implementing a voucher program so people can take public money to private schools (thus reducing the pool of money for public schools and potentially sending it to religious schools), all while most schools are adding students (and have to do more with less). The performance pay is a particularly crazy idea. Basically, all teachers will have salaries cut in half (or more) and have to wait for 2 years in order for peformance data to be gathered and then they will be ELIGIBLE for additional pay (gee I wonder how easy it will be to get that performance pay when the budget continues to be cut, and even if you get it, I wonder if they’ll come anywhere near where they were, let alone come near pretty much anyone else with a bachelor’s degree (minimum) salary. Thanks to the full repub control of the state, it will get done. I think they can save a bunch of money if they just give all the kids good grades and bachelor’s degrees, then the state will look great (which is essentially what will happen anyway when kid performance is tied to pay). Sorry, went off on this one (big surprise, I know)…
I see your complaints about Indiana and raise you 60 kids per classroom which is the current plan for the coming year in Detroit.
You can’t continue to fund schools through property taxes as home-ownership is a dream that is slipping away from more and more people. You can’t perpetuate a system which provides good schools for the wealthy areas and crap schools for the poor areas. You can’t continue to squeeze more and more benefits from smaller and smaller budgets. You can’t continue to keep poorly performing teachers on staff (because the unions have made it darn difficult to get rid of anyone).
So, where does that leave us? Public schools are funded wrong. Period. Be it via income tax or sales tax, the states need to collect the funds from EVERYONE who works in the state rather than just home-owners. The money needs to be spread equally among the school districts (the wealthy areas can always gather more via fund-raisers and what not, so the uber-privileged can safely remain that way). The schools districts, of course, need to be more responsible with their money at all levels (even the top). The money that’s there needs to be driven down to the front lines, to those who are interacting with students, not left floating at the top to service layers upon layers of administration.
Ah… it’s a mess, and there are no easy answers, but we do have to change how the schools are funded… that seems to be job one…