Paul Bonner is a retired educator. I’m very happy that he comments on the blog. He is wise.
He writes:
You can’t drive a Mercedes Benz while paying monthly payments for a Pinto. First, public school effectiveness would be positively impacted if we invested in teacher training, resource support, and profoundly better pay. Would this cost more than current outlays?
Certainly. In the fall of 2022, the Congress passed a defense spending bill that was 48 billion higher than requested by the Department of Defense, claiming we had seriously depleted arm stocks due to Ukraine. Currently over 50% of our defense spending goes to private corporate arms interests.
Four years ago General McChrystal said adequately funding our public schools is our biggest National Security concern.
So, if we are so willing to overspend for defense, why aren’t we willing to invest in the public schools? Exclusive private K-12 schools now charge $30,000 and up to provide quality instruction, small classes, and, basically, a liberal arts education.
According to the Education Data Initiative, the US averaged $13,700.00 per student in the public schools. This does not account for the inequality that exists because schools are predominately funded by property taxes.
We cannot get better schools with current spending. That’s the point. Public schools are an investment. The defense department is a privatization scheme run by CEO’s who make millions of dollars a year bilking the Federal Treasury. Which investment would make us safer?
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The weapons industry in the United States is the largest in the world, just like the United States has the largest porn industry in the world and the largest prison population in the world.
There is nothing the NRA, private prison industry (where inmates can have their sentences extended by just not eating all the food you are told to eat), and porn industry wants more than a government just like Putin’s Russia.
The explosion in guns sales and second amendment theology is the result of an arms industry that just wants to make more money. Eisenhower warned us of this.
He did.
Advocates for the public schools, I intentionally leave out Democrats here, understand that taxes for schools represent an investment in a healthier economy and society. Republicans simply see taxation as money they cannot have. The irony is that better investment in young families and children results in less dependence on government with a more vibrant and balanced economy. It is profoundly inefficient to interpret privatization as greater choice. Government largesse simply grows in size and ineffectiveness as we provide subsidies for the disrupters who keep their profits to themselves.
More people are starting to understand the implications of privatization that results in underfunding public education. I also think some are starting to understand that their tax dollars are being used to underwrite somebody else’s profit while the public schools face loss and uncertainty from useless disruption and churn.
We will continue to delve in existential politics until the powerful in the Democratic politics realize this.
Paul,if money is an issue for you, who will pay for the education and medical care for the millions who have entered our country illegally the last three years?
Thank you for confirming my point about Republicans. The issues I raise are not relevant to a lack of federal immigration policy. Divert attention away from the need to establish a responsible government that provides for everyone when you offer no alternative vision that could get us there.
Douglas makes the same mistake that Repugnicans always make with regard to immigration. They imagine, in their race-hatred-fevered imaginations, that it’s a one-way street with “those people.” Undocumented immigrants create demand, like other workers, which creates jobs. And these people, to a person, are almost entirely ignorant of the fact that most of them pay taxes and receive very little in government services. So, the answer to the question that Douglas poses is this: The education of the children of those immigrants will be paid for by their contributions via labor and via their taxes to the economy of United States, and the impact of their contributions will be EVEN MORE offsetting that are the impact of the contributions made by citizens because, unlike citizens, they qualify for and receive VERY FEW, ALMOST NO ADDITIONAL GOVERNMENT SERVICES.
Really? What taxes are people here illegally paying?
Read the note below, Mr. Douglas.
The new migrants come here to work. They are not allowed to work. I don’t understand why. There are plenty of unfilled jobs. That’s why some red states are dropping their child labor laws.
It’s shocking and sickening. So much unnecessary misery when there is enough to go around. But we live in a country where half of the population is incredibly backward, and the oligarchs who own the media find it useful to keep them that way.
cx: in their race-hatred-fevered brains
To be quite clear about this: First, undocumented immigrants working in the United States buy groceries and gasoline and bluejeans and T-shirts just like everyone else and so, just like everyone else, they CREATE DEMAND, which creates jobs. They also create small businesses that employe both citizen and noncitizen workers at TEN TIMES the rate that citizens do. Economists know, for there have been a LOT of studies of this, that their overall impact is actually–completely contrary to the Reich-wing myth–an overall increase in jobs in this country of about 1 percent–not a large increase, but an increase nonetheless. Second, the employers of undocumented immigrants take taxes from their pay and credit these to Individual Tax Identification Numbers (ITINs) instead of Social Security Numbers. From the Boundeless 2002 Immigration Report:
“[U]ndocumented immigrants pay billions of dollars each year in taxes – over $492 billion dollars in total taxes in 2019 alone. In fact, several studies have found that undocumented immigrants would earn much more, and therefore pay much more in taxes, if they had temporary or permanent legal status.
“Immigrants in the U.S. contributed more than $330.7 billion in federal income taxes in 2019, and over $492 billion dollars in total taxes (including state, municipal, and sales taxes). The Tax Foundation estimates that American and immigrant taxpayers paid $1.6 trillion in individual income taxes in 2019. In this context, it’s important to note that immigrants made up only 13.5% of the U.S. population in 2020, meaning that immigrants make an outsized contribution to the U.S. revenue system.”
But, if you get your “alternative facts” from people like Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson, who just make shit up, then you will end up thinking that the undocumented people standing on rooftops in the hot sun, doing repairs or picking oranges or cleaning hotel rooms or trimming hedges take more than they give, which is utterly false. But, hey, it stokes the flames of racial hatred that run the current Repugnican engine.
But gee, guess what, you would never learn any of that listening to Tucker (spell that with an F) Carlson, who just makes stuff up while doing his imitation of a cartoon whistling teapot.
My mother-in-law always said, “What if the military had to hold bake sales?”
And, if you all haven’t watched “Fog of War” Eisenhower (Republican) warns of the Military Industrial Complex. Moreover, see “Lords of War” with Nicholas Cage (YouTube key clips). We always had to “sell something” to get the money we needed for our basic necessities. When I was at the store (and I knew to the dime of every price for every item from crayons to rulers to paint — coupons, teacher discount, Walmart, Michaels, Dollar Tree) to make sure I could what I needed to provide for my students, but also so I could actually teach. I would get the “stink eye” from my wife if she was with me at the store, “Is that for school? You can’t keep spending your own money on things for these kids.” I remember at one point after calculating my “school budget” and my student population, I had about $1.07 per student to teach art. I did it because it was the right thing to do and believe me, it made things easier because I would be evaluated on my teaching even though “public education is free and we mean free” (we all got a letter when we all were trying to raise money for supplies). Someone forgot about a thing called “subsidization” in order to make it all free. I taught the kids to not whine about it, because we could make it work. Besides, if they could make quality art with crap, then wait until they got the good stuff; the fundamentals were core and I had a kid who could make anything out of cardboard — all about solving problems. Thank goodness I was an excellent “dumpster diver” which made it all so sad for one of the most important things in children’s lives: a decent education. I could go on and on about how money is “categorized” but like Mr Bonner state, another time. Peace out.
But $17 million a year to fly jet fighters over NASCAR races is really important for our national security!
Military jets, or more so their pilots, have to fly so many hours a month to maintain their flight status, so whether they are flying over a NASCAR race, the Army-Navy Game, the Super Bowl, or Donald Trump’s inauguration, it really doesn’t matter, they have to fly so many hours.
That’s their excuse, alright. By putting those flights under their training budget,, they can say one of those flights only costs $100,000 for fuel instead of $450,000 altogether. Very convenient. You know what, the government doesn’t pay my school to train me in order to earn and keep my teacher credential status. I pay for that, $400 dollars a class. Maybe I should try teaching from a fighter jet flying over my school. Maybe the Department of Defense would pay half a million dollars for that, don’t you think?
Let’s just tell the military they can “do more with less.” We could also make the owners of defense contract companies take standardized tests, and if they don’t do well we cut the military’s budget more.
This article simply raises a question. Why don’t we just have the Department of Defense take over the funding and running of our “public schools”. My grandsons attend DoD on the Post were their mother is assigned. As a retired Michigan Public School teacher I can tell you my grandsons are getting a fine liberal arts based education. It is clear that the DoD feels that the children of their personnel are an important national asset and it does not constantly try to reduce the amount of money it spends on the various posts’ schools.
I am so glad that my grandsons are attending elementary schools on the Post rather than one of the public schools in Michigan where 40 years of Fascist-Republican rule during which the real funding of our once excellent public schools has constantly been slashed so that members of the DeVos family [remember Betsy] can make huge profits running mediocre or worse charter schools.
The DoD has a problem recruiting new service personnel and their running the nation’s public schools would help them establish the rapport with the students that would help with recruiting.
Funny, I remember military families moving to try to live in the local school district that had quality schools. Some districts were decidedly poor, and military parents tried their hardest not to have to send their kids there. Unfortunately, not everyone makes enough to live in communities with better schools.
We cannot get better schools with them continuing to be run on bad ideas cooked up by Jeb Bush, Bill Gates, and David Coleman.
agree!
Awesome. There we are. Common ground.
It feels a bit weird to write about school from the outside looking in. Having gotten out of the school business a year ago, it seems far off and strange already. Still, my daughter is still in school. I get an inkling of what is going on.
One of the things I notice is that testing still drives what goes on in class. Whether it is AP or regular classes, students quit learning in school a whole month early. This is required due to the time needed to grade and fabricate a grading scale. The students are not engaged after these tests. Add to this the disruption caused by giving the tests and preparation for the tests (sorry, this is not learning), and you can see one day a week wasted in testing alone. Plus, enormous amounts are spent on this.
Another money and time sink is school tech. I saw my real wage stagnate relative to inflation for my last 20 years. The politicians would throw money at computers and software, but not at my salary.
The teacher shortage that now occasionally makes the papers has been a reality all my career. In fact, my masters in History did not get me a job, it was the math teacher shortage that achieved that purpose. The last ten years I taught, some of my fellow math teachers had to do double duty, teaching lessons to two different classes while students were supervised in completing lessons by uncredited personnel.
It just gets worse. Government does not serve, and the people keep electing the same people to do the same bad job.
It’s been fascinating, make that terrifying, to learn about the history of authoritarian rule during this age of Trump. The fact that people follow leaders who have little regard for their citizens seems counterintuitive but is the historical rule. In school, while learning about WWII, I remember wondering why would people follow leaders who look like cartoon characters. Today almost half of the American population is supporting central casting for Marvel Comics villains. Many spend a lot of time castigating our many bad actors, but the electorate continues to put them in office. We act as if government is some kind of abstraction when it has profound impacts on our well being. Many vote claiming they want small government while putting people in office who spend more giving it to the wealthier among us. Good governing takes thoughtfulness and expertise. If voters continue to choose based on single issue false moral equivalences, then only those at the top of the rubble will thrive.
I know I’m a broken record on this, but the arguments about this have been stale for a while and the problem is less that we don’t allocate for public education — that is THE problem — it’s that we don’t, at the federal level, have funds available. Not because of tax policy or mandatory social spending per se, but because of political priorities translated into annual funding legislation. Once you take military spending out of annual discretionary spending, only 30 cents of every federal dollar is left to pay for EVERY other federal function — for Meals on Wheels, education, FDA food inspection, all scientific research, community centers, highways, you name it — forcing them to “fight” among themselves for very limited funding. This is exacerbated by tax policies that do no reflect the achievable needs for society at large. Unless we seriously address military funding to at least make it 50% of federal spending, all other arguments are just a Titanic-like moving the problem around while the main problem is ignored.