Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is being attacked by the Left for cutting millions of dollars in federal funding for literacy programs. She says they don’t work and are a waste.
Congressman Josh Harder is being hailed as a hero for criticizing DeVos.
The hypocrisy from @BetsyDeVosED is shocking. She does lots of photo ops reading to kids… but then goes to DC and tries to cut EVERY literacy program. pic.twitter.com/RpjQOAGJSY
— Rep. Josh Harder (@RepJoshHarder) April 10, 2019
I just want to point out something.
In Washington DC, one of the areas fully supported by the federal government, only 17% of students are proficient at reading.
It costs $29,409 to educate one student in DC public schools.
The entire public school education for one student K-12 is upwards of $350,000.
That means, for a 8 out of 10 high school seniors about to graduate, after more than a third of a million dollars of educational benefit over 12 years each, they would struggle to finish a Nancy Drew book.
Perhaps throwing more money at teachers and bureaucrats who fail that badly isn’t the answer.
Maybe there are some places in the country where the issue really is a lack of funding.
I really believe that the issue is school administrators know that if 50% reading proficiency gets them a million dollars in funds, than 25% reading proficiency gets them two million dollars in funds.
I would bank on the 17% of kids who are proficient in reading are only proficient because their parents read with them and they didn’t pick it up in school.
Perhaps the solution would be figuring out where the money went in all the places that got funds and still had reading problems and then putting some administrators in prison.
Government is the only place where you can get a raise and promotion for having an 83% failure rate at the one job you have. The Democrats see that as a feature, DeVos clearly sees that as a bug.
Money cannot replace parents choosing to instill a love of learning – and reading as an enabling mechanism – in their kids. Without that, no matter how much is spent the results will be not be what you want.
Me, I was lucky. I was reading well above grade level and I still remember the first “real” book I read on my own. 🙂
“…tried to cut every literacy program…”
Bullshit. Show me where Ms. DeVils suggested eliminating primary school. Or parents reading to, and tutoring, children.
But, I am not surprised. When you “own” the plantation, you have an abundant supply of shit. Why not spread it around?
How much of that money actually goes to educating students instead of the multiple levels of bureaucrats running it? First you’ve got the federal DOE. Then that money trickles to the state DOE which has to fund itself, then the local systems which have their own bureaucrats to finance. All have their own buildings, offices, utilities, salaries, and support personnel.
After that, in Illinois at least, 50% avg of school budgets go towards funding pensions. One lobbyist got a full teacher’s pension when he sub’bed one day in his carreer and used a trick to ‘buy’ the rest of his time.
And there’s one of the reasons I was glad to move out of illinois: the unfunded pension liabilities are scary big, and I have zero desire to be a homeowner or worker in the state when they come home to roost.
I can’t believe you left the Dem paradise of Illinois. I am looking for suggestions on where to move out of here.
“Perhaps the solution would be figuring out where the money went in all the places that got funds and still had reading problems and then putting some administrators in prison.
Government is the only place where you can get a raise and promotion for having an 83% failure rate at the one job you have. ”
This would indicate that the teachers are the only ones responsible for the educational success of the students. This ignores the fact that many parents and students don’t want to learn. I used to think the same way, until I retired from my career and became a teacher.
I have a student who has been absent 64 times this year. Today was our 124th day of school.
I have a student whose mother checks her out every day at 1 o’clock. Why? Because the child has a job, and needs to get there. The mother, when confronted about this, said, “A woman has got to earn a living.”
I have countless stories of parents and students who just don’t care. No matter how good of a job that a teacher does, no one can make someone learn.
The counter argument is to claim that we should not keep paying for schooling for students who won’t or can’t learn, but that is impossible. The Supreme Court has ruled that all children in the USA have a constitutional right to an education at public expense. Whether they want it or not. Whether we want to pay for it or not. The real solution is to get rid of the ones who refuse to learn and spend our resources where they will do the most good, but instead we spend most of our resources on the lazy, the handicapped, and the unwilling.
My wife was a teacher in South Dakota. I know what you are talking about. Every one of her Native American students dropped out at 16, which was the dropout age in SD, because they could make more money in total combined welfare and assistance programs (some only available to Natives) than they could with a job that payed (if I remember correctly) about $17 per hour.
I get that.
So then why waste the money on kids who are not grateful for it and will take advantage of it?
Also, this is why I favor creating some sort of modernized version of the Victorian Poorhouse. If you are this much of a failure, than in exchange for goverment assistance you have to give up freedom. You want housing? You have to live in our dorm, go to school when we tell you, work when we tell you, eat what we serve you, and learn to be a functioning member of society.
If you want complete freedom, you have to fend for your self.
Nothing made me angrier then when I was working while in school and would see people come in and pull cash out of the ATM with their EBT card and use it to buy cigarettes and beer. Or when I would come home at lunch to take my dog for a walk and my neighbors in the subsided units were outside in the middle of the day drinking. If you can’t live without a handout of my tax dollars, you shouldn’t have the money to buy alcohol and tobacco.