Jeff Bryant is doing an article about the St. Louis public schools. As he has delved into the issues, he learned how the state of Missouri has underfunded the schools for years. And he learned something more. The city is gentrifying. It wants young childless couples. Parents of school age children are a burden to the budget.
“As a local St. Louis reporter tells it, during a public meeting about a proposed new $130 million 34-story apartment building in the city, alderman Joe Roddy used a slideshow to make a case for why the city should give the developers 15 years of reduced property taxes, a $10 million subsidy, in exchange for some additional retail space and 305 high-end, luxury apartments downtown.
“In a slide show titled “How the City Makes & Spends Money,” Roddy, a Democrat mind you, laid out a hierarchy of those who “make money” for the city at the top and those who cause the city to “spend money” at the bottom. At the top of his slide were businesses. In the middle were residents with no children and retirees. And at the very bottom – in the tier of city dwellers who place the biggest financial burden on government – were “criminals and residents with children in public school.”
“When told that some might take offense at equating families with children needing free public schools to criminals, Roddy countered that the project would “target tenants who are young professionals without children. Attracting that demographic to the city is crucial, he says, and after the tax abatement ends, the revenue windfall for the city will be significant.”
“By the way, St. Louis has a history of extending tax abatements for developers to longer terms.
“But the thrust of Roddy’s remarks is well understood by all – in a budget environment of forced scarcity, there are increasingly strong demarcations between winners and losers, and parents who plan on sending children to free public schools are increasingly losers.
“To be fair to Roddy, a great deal of St. Louis’s financial constraints, particularly in relation to the city’s ability to cover the cost of education, is the fault of the state of Missouri.
“A 2015 accounting of state school funding found Missouri is “underfunding its K-12 schools by $656 million statewide, nearly 20 percent below the required level.” The budget situation for families with children has not improved a lot since then, with this year’s installment cutting spending on school buses, higher education, and social services.
“Missouri is one of 27 states that spends less on education than it did in 2008.”
There is a trend behind this. Education costs money. Gentrifying cities don’t want children. Does America want to educate its children?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I’d call that a lack of foresight.
Thanks Diane!
Thanks Diane. Thanks Jeff. Good article for the Urban league people arriving for their convention.
By the way, Danny Wicentowski is the author of the Riverfront Times article which dates back to December 14, 2016.
Once the Bill Gates cabal and/or ALEC take over the country after a Constitutional Convention allows them to revise the Constitution allowing them to sterilize at least half the population, if you are born into poverty or are born with any learning disabilities, you will be sterilized at birth.
But you will still have to pay taxes from your poverty wages that will support the autocratic, for-profit, secretive, fraudulent, inferior, child abusing corporate charter schools and/or vouchers that teach the children of the upper middle class or wealthiest Americans who will pay the lowest or no taxes.
Those billionaires have NO CLUE and just making sure they have MEGA income flow. They are broken, greedy know-it-allá, who don’t know s—. about anything having to do re: teaching and learning.
Yvonne Siu-Runyan It’s funny how “follow the money” usually refers to finding the crime. Unfortunately, intelligence and creativity have a tendency to fall away in direct relation to increases in how much money, influence, and ignorance you have glued to your soul.
I think that the utter isolation bubble the billionaires live in will be their downfall.
I doubt it will be their downfall.
There was a time when the ultra-wealthy needed the rest of us to work in their factories. But those days are long gone.
They can now move offshore to their own private Islands and live out their lives in a luxurious world of their own creation, utterly oblivious to what is going on around them.
The billionaires don’t need Americans to work in their factories or teach their children, because they came hire desitute foreigners to do that for next to nothing and can also afford their own private armies and helicopters and cruise missiles to protect them.
The only thing they might potentially have to give up would be living in the US and Western Europe, but I doubt that will ever be the case, since they can also afford to buy politicians.
SomeDAM poet About the comfort of oligarchs: Richard Engall made an interesting historical point about the Russian oligarchs on MSNBC the other night. It seems when everything was finally privatized in Russia after its fall, and they elected Putin to get rid of all of the corruption that flowed in when they practically gave away public institutions to the oligarchs, what Putin got rid of were the oligarchs that didn’t support him and his consolidation of power. The clamp-down on human rights and the freedom of speech along with the number and pattern of killings and attempted killings of those who opposed Putin defies the argument from coincidence. One oligarch who escaped said he was fine with the way thing were going–he was rich, after all–“UNTIL THEY CAME FOR ME.”
The other interesting thing I heard on CBS’s 60 Minutes was how much the Trump base in the heartland and the south was being schmoozed by the Russians and how many there have embraced Russia and Putin–one said Russians were fine because they “looked like us.” (My guess is that, translated, the code is: WHITE.) (duh) Another said he met a really nice Russian at a gun control rally. My guess is that the Russians are anti-abortion now, on principle. That’ll solidify their IN-STATUS with the religious right and increasing collection of “useful idiots.” Who need nuclear weapons when so many of “the people” are willfully ignorant?
Fortunately, Congress (all but 2) knows its history and put a lock on Trump suspending the sanctions put on Russia. I see that as the camel’s nose under the tent but, again, finger-on-the-pulse: we’ll see.
CBK,
Funny how Trump has adopted the rhetoric of the left re Russia, claiming to be a victim of a “witch hunt.” That was the phrase used by critics of Joe McCarthy. So now the Trump base loves Putin because Russians are white. Strange turn of events.
Trump mansion in Palm Beach just applied for 70 vidas for cooks, maids, waiters. During Made in America week. Said no American workers could perform these jobs.
Every time a state is mentioned, I’m going to the “ALEC’s REPORT CARD ON AMERICAN EDUCATION.”
For Missouri, go to p. 33 on the link below.
Click to access 2016-ALEC-Education-Report-Card_Final_Web.pdf
Missouri is at No. 16, mostly because it gets an “F” for not yet allowing vouchers (called “Private School Choice Programs“,)
With 51 entries (all 50 plus D.C.), the state ranked #26 — Washington state — would be the median.
It’s worth noting:
The nations in the world with the most successful education systems, such as Finland, DO THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF WHAT ALEC AND ITS REPORT RECOMMEND for the operation of its schools.
Jack, what a link 🙂 ! I was wondering if it would prove to be an upside-down-version of rankings based on test scores & grad rates, such as one sees at USN&WR, wallethub, etc. But no! For example, 4 states usually placing in the top 5 per trad’l ankings are MA, Conn, NH, NJ. ALEC ranks them as MA #32, Conn #34, NH #43 (!), NJ #14..
All of them get F on ‘school choice allowed’. All get A on standards. The differences lie in the 3 other categories.
The diffs betw & MA & Conn are slim. Both score B- on ‘Teacher quality/policies [would that be VAM?]. Even tho’ lower-ranked Conn edges out MA on [less] “homeschool regs burden”, & “digital learning”, MA edges Conn out on “charter schools”, presumably looser charter law, which apparently counts more heavily.
Poor old NH. Their homesch regs & digi-learning falls w/n the same C/D territory as MA & Conn. Apparenly they got busted down to the 40’s because of a D in “teacher quality/ policy”, just not hi-stakes-VAMming hard enough.
And how did NJ emerge smelling like a rose, w/their ALEC rank just 10 slots below trad’l rank? Well, their digi-learning is same as Conn, but their teacher VAMming is a bit less rigid than either MA or Conn. It’s just because… they get an A for homeschooling! No reg burden at all! (Here in NJ you can homeschool however you want, then go get a GED. If you want a NJ diploma, that’s another story).
“And how did NJ emerge smelling like a rose, w/their ALEC rank just 10 slots below trad’l rank?”
My guess is that they wanted to give teacher-union-hater and NJ governor Chris Christie a pat on the head for his non-stop seven years of demonizing traditional public schools and the unionized teachers who work in them. There are numerous YouTube videos where Christie screams at teachers.
Check out this photo (with his godawful wife smiling on in approval) that shows him tearing into into a teacher in public after she questioned his policies:
A picture such as this gives a green light to the public that this is how they should treat teachers. As one teacher put it, teachers are “the new Jews.”
I much prefer Christie’s picture on the beach, Jack.
I prefer Christie on the beach, too.
Better than Baywatch!
Cross posted at https://dianeravitch.net/2017/07/23/jeff-bryant-how-are-public-school-parents-like-criminals/#respond
with this comment:
The legislatures are int he hans of the corporations.
It is not just in Missouri, that public education is the target.
The Corporate Raid on Public Schools in Indianapolis: School Board Election Corrupted by Dark Money https://dianeravitch.net/2017/06/28/the-corporate-raid-on-public-schools-in-indianapolis-school-board-election-corrupted-by-dark-money/
Here is an important article about the Silicon Valley billionaires who want to remake America’s schools, although none has any deep knowledge of children or cognition or the multiple social issues that affect children and families. Being tech entrepreneurs, most of them think there is a technological fix for every problem.
Not even beta testers.
Alpha testers.
This is Bill Gates’ MO for Microsoft software.
Produce crap and then loose it on the public to find thousands (if not millions) of bugs, which are automatically sent back to Microsoft.
When are people going to wake up to this fraud, Gates?
SomeDAM poet Such practices provide a good argument for nationalization of “certain” industries. Their whole idea is that they can do it better but, like with charter schools and education: “It’s not happnin.”
Equating the child rearing families with criminals exposes the mayor’s bias against public education. He does not see it as an investment in the future, and the state’s disinvestment in public education further confirms the mayor’s view. Too many politicians today fail to see the bigger picture, so we have climate change deniers and an unwillingness to pay for public education.
Roddy is not the mayor. The new mayor is Lynda Krewson, (Dim). She did good by having a confederate monument taken out of Forest Park, much to the dismay of all the racists here in the St. Louis area. The jury is still out, though, on Krewson as I believe she pretty much favors things like gentrifiation.
Diane That’s what happens when politicians trade democratic for capitalist-only principles. The criteria for belonging changes–from “all citizens” to “all who have money and influence.” I cannot figure why–they don’t want to pay their taxes anyway?
The extremely practical fallacy of that idea is that intelligence and creativity don’t necessarily, or even commonly, follow wealth. In fact, wealth and unmitigated power tend to diminish our developmental reach. That’s why some of the dumbest and most unqualified people in world history were kings and plutocrats. The whole idea of “children are a drag on the economy” flies-in-the-face of higher practical principles–for instance, development (education) of all, if fostered, and though no guarantee, provides the best possibility for a culture (as truly cultured) to meet their problems intelligently and creatively, and to thrive from generation to generation.
They need to read Jane Jacobs on these issues. I remain a capitalist at heart, but not defined as it is at present in the United States (at least) with its now-common predatory movements. However, it’s astonishing to me how easily some politicians trade away their integrity, and their broader constituency, for the big-city lights of money and moguls as only-and-end result with no regard for how they get there. No one has to declare an authoritarian or fascist state. It just creeps in quietly like a cancer. And all they have to do is say: “anti-abortion” and the Catholics and other religious leaders, and their well-meaning but politically ignorant followers, bow down at their feet.
Makes me wonder how many other cities think the same way.
Interesting Note: The less that is paid per pupil, the better the ALEC grade
Wow, powerful stuff here: “There is a trend behind this. Education costs money. Gentrifying cities don’t want children. Does America want to educate its children?”
ciedie aech: yes, powerful stuff indeed.
Perhaps the last sentence you cite needs to be tweaked: “Does America want any more children?”
With the rheephorm proviso, of course, that it refers to OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN aka the vast majority. As for the children of the heavyweights of corporate education reform and their likeminded peers, and those that enforce and sell their eduproducts and other rotten wares—
Not for THEIR OWN CHILDREN.
And when it comes to budgets, the sky’s the limit. No expense spared.
What’s that look like? Bill Gates. His children. Lakeside School.
Link: https://www.lakesideschool.org
‘Nuff said.
😎
scary insight
Just read today in the St.L Post Dispatch that St. Louis leads the nation, yes more than NYC and Chitown, in tax abatement “historical buildings” projects which are nothing more than “welfare for the rich”.
Another reason why billionaires want to do away with Social Security, Medicare, and the ACA. To free up more money for corporate welfare.
What, they want childless, celibate couples? I mean, couples do tend to have a nasty habit of turning into threesomes, foursomes, etc., y’know.
If only the rich bear children, they can go straight to private schools and the public school option can be eliminated. The only remaining issue is maintaining a large enough servitude class.
They have a virtually endless supply of “servants” in places like China,Mexico and India — to work in their factories and even high tech engineering firms. They can (and do) even hire engineers on temporary visas from countries like India for far cheaper than American citizens.
Human beings have become an expendible resource for the ultra-wealthy.