Nancy Bailey, expert blogger and retired teacher, was outraged that the Biden infrastructure plan omitted the $100 billion that was promised to renovate and repair school buildings.
She writes:
Our public schools should be safe, welcoming places, that support the work of teachers, cherish students, and provide a climate and atmosphere conducive for learning.
Our public schools should be the pride of our nation!
We are all to blame for not caring enough to demand great public schools for all of our children, a huge equity issue! Wake up to the fact that children, mostly poor, in this country are attending dangerous school buildings that could make them sick.
Read the rest of her plea for safe, welcoming buildings.
And consider this: In Finland, architects compete to design beautiful school buildings. When I was there, I received a coffee-table book displaying the most outstanding school buildings in the nation. Why do we neglect the spaces in which our children spend hours daily and are expected to learn?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Years ago, I rented an office in a 19th-century public school building. Marble floors. Brick exterior walls. Breathtakingly beautiful carved oak bannisters on the stairways. The place was gorgeous and in great shape after all those decades. Meanwhile, the schools built in the 1970s were falling apart ten years later. Our buildings need to be long-term investments, and they need to say to our children, we value you.
The Curia Julia, which housed the Roman Senate, still stands today.
Bob: interesting that the Roman senate met deep into the Middle Ages, incognicant of the fact that their decision making was vacuous
Elitist Old Boys’ clubs are like that.
Maybe US Senators’ decisions will also one day be vacuous.
But, it won’t take the dissolution of the United States to make it so.
A Constitutional Amendment could achieve the same thing.
Hopefully it won’t take the dissolution
Machin and Sinema’s skulls are already vacuous, but unfortunately they still hold a lot of weight.
One of those Buddhist koans, no doubt.
Or maybe not, since physics posits that the vacuum has a great deal of energy and Einsteins equation tells us that energy is equivalent to mass (which has weight on earth)
So vacuum carries a lot of weight!
Another way of saying that Machin, Sinema and many other Senators are very dense-skulled.
There may even be black holes in there, for all we know, since reasonable suggestions go in but never come out.
Spell check keeps changing Manchin to Machin.
Maybe it means Machine?
Teacher unions can demand safe working conditions for workers. Individual whistleblowers can also file complaints against employers. Anyone filing the complaint would have to provide evidence that confirms their complaint and send the information to OSHA. Students and teachers should not be exposed to asbestos, lead, mold and other hazardous materials Nancy Bailey lists. https://www.osha.gov/workers
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Out in the rural communities of the American Great Plains, I have watched elderly men lovingly tend the flowers in front of ornate school buildings. My vision of community education.
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Even in many suburban America there is a great deal of community pride in the public schools. We had parents come out to do landscaping in front of the building. If there is a problem with any heat in any buildings, parents immediately speak up at a BOE meeting, and the issue gets addressed. My district also floated a bond more than twenty years ago to address asbestos in all older buildings. Community pride in the schools is everywhere. Parents want their children to attend safe, welcoming schools.
cx: suburban American communities
Finland: beautifully designed schools, teachers valued and respected, universal healthcare, a high unionization rate, and other social programs we can only dream of.
Why not in the USA? Mainly because one party constantly screams socialism, communism and wokeness at the mere mention of any progressive proposals.
Yes, corporate Dems are a problem and the big bucks from the libertarian billionaires who want to keep the cruel status quo but the party of NO and Insurrection is the biggest obstacle to sanity.
Joe Jersey,
The Democratic Party controls hold control over the state legislature and occupy the governorship of New Jersey. The same is true in California, Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Illinois, Delaware, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Maine. Do you think citizens in these states have far superior daily lives than states like Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, and Utah, where the state government is entirely Republican? Population movements suggest otherwise. The three states to have lost the most people during the pandemic are California, Illinois, and New York. The three states to have gained the most people during the pandemic are Arizona, Florida, and Texas. My son and his spouse were among those leaving California because San Francisco, perhaps the most left leaning Democratically controlled city in the country, has become unlivable for all but it’s most wealthy residents.
It would be very helpful if the Democratic Party would lead by example and make the states where it holds monopoly power into something more resembling Finland and less the beaches and favelas of Rio.
Just. a caveat: AZ, FL & TX just MAY have enjoyed a population increase due to, you know, better year-round weather (one good reason for leaving IL) & lots of retirees? (As I type this, geese flying overhead, traveling to such places: it snow-showered yesterday.)
Anyway, & interestingly enough: IL has lifted the COVID travel advisory for FL, which has been a hot spot. Cases decreased. Could this be weather-related
or is it because FL hasn’t had any reliable COVID stats since DeINSANEtis had their #cruncher (& family!) threatened by armed police?
OH, OK, teaching economist, you are going off on some tangent unrelated to my comment which stresses that the GOP has morphed into an anti-democratic, insurrectionist party that appeals to far right neo-Nazis, militia types and those who still don’t accept a free and fair election (of Biden). Trump, who still holds sway over the GOP, continues to say the election was a fraud, stolen and that he should be president.
Murphy is 1,000% better than Chris Christie but I guess you think Christie did wonders for NJ.
Joe Jersey, you are on target. The GOP is now the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Paul Gosar, Trump. They stand united against democracy. Trump believes he won the election and is crazed. The rest of the party stands with him or is intimidated. The GOP treats the horrific insurrection of Jan 6 as no big deal. If this party takes control in 2024, this country is in deep trouble.
I am hopeful that the movement of people from blue states to red states will increase the political power of Democrats in states like Texas, Florida, and Arizona. Arizona is a state whose Governor prefers a tax rate of zero, which means stagnant or no public services. People in Texas can openly carry a loaded gun without a permit. DeSantis is trying to be like Trump, which means that environmental challenges to Florida’s beaches and bayous and ecosystem will be ignored, a terrible legacy for the state’s perilous future.
retiredbutmissthekisds,
I enjoyed the year round weather in California when I lived there. The mediterriranean climate of California is, I think, ideal for humans. The few times I have been in Arizona near the summer has not been nearly as pleasant as the average high temperature in June is 104, July 106, and August 105. Perhaps you enjoy heat more than I do.
Joe Jersey,
I took your post to mean that the reason that the United States does not look more like Finland is because of the Republican party. Surely you must think that those places where the influence of the Republican party is minuscule, like San Fransisco, must look a lot more like Finland than somewhere that the Republican party has complete control like Indianapolis. Is that incorrect?
Joe is more than on target, he’s a sharpshooter!
DeINSANEtis had their #cruncher (& family!) threatened by armed police”
Can’t get any lower than going after a woman scientist and her kids with a heavily armed SWAT team.
Do they teach that at Harvard Law School?
the US has fully sold out to big money education interests such as testing and tech: the game of profits now has a stranglehold over common sense education
Joe
Why not here?
Finland’s demographic is different.
A conservative religious revival in Finland, Laestadianism, has very few followers relative to the total population. Finland is characterized as progressively losing the influence of religious institutions which is good for common goods like education.
Laestadianism’s religious in Finland criticize schools for the same reasons that the conservative religious do here. In the U.S., the conservative religious, working in tandem with despot Koch, deny the schools financial support because they have the number of voters to do so.
One Laestadianism example is shown in the objection to the Finnish education department’s arts program. The department included a new version of the opera, Carmen. An examination of history shows that the inspiration for Carmen was a woman struggling for the rights of women and labor. (The new production is called Kill Carmen, the LA Times wrote about it on 9-12-2001.) The opera’s original fiction met with the approval of the norms at the time. I presume that the religious of Laestadianism don’t want women’s equality any more than American conservative religious do. The unmerited privilege, which favors men, finds voice in interpretations of the Bible. Schools that don’t adhere to Biblical teaching, teach equality.
BBB is another easy-to-remember presidential campaign acronym/slogan similar to MAGA but with different meanings behind them. Both mean little to nothing without cooperation from Congress to pass legislation that delivers on the promises made.
Too many voters do not know how our government works. When things go wrong because of Congress or the Courts, they always blame the president.
Presidents also have little to no impact on the economy no matter what they do but when the economy is great, they take the credit and when it tanks, they get the blame.
The same goes for unemployment and job growth.
Build Back is better than nothing, but it is not the New Deal. It’s not even Build Back Better; it is Build Back Charter. Think New Orleans and Puerto Rico. We all know that when there is a deadly hurricane, a deadly flood, a deadly pandemic, a Rhee, or any other disaster, they don’t “build back”. They’re regressive. They Build Backward. They use relief funds to privatize and deregulate. They open markets and corner lion’s shares One can’t help but imagine some U.S. congresspeople and presidents breaking into longstanding public schools in the middle of the night, in their pajamas, with sledgehammers to punch holes in the walls and expose asbestos. Frankly, I’m surprised they haven’t yet resorted in Nero-like greed to arson, to literally setting fire to public school buildings. They use only building funds to buy iPads for SBAC testing. They are not going to rebuild school infrastructure and that they would is Build Back Banter.
“It’s not even Build Back Better; it is Build Back Charter. Think New Orleans..”
You left out an “l”
“Build Black Charter”
Bill Backed Banter = Gates funded philanthropy
Bill Banked Banter also works
Bill’s Blank Banter also works
As does Blankety Blank Banter
Blankety Blank Billanthropy
Bill Banked Bull$&!t also works
Ok, that’s all. I have much better things to do today.
Sorry, one more
Bill’s Blank Blather