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The Dog Eats Its Tail: Oversized Classes, Overpopulated Prisons
One in thirty one.
As a public school teacher
I am quite familiar with this figure—it’s a typical teacher to student
ratio in the classroom. But now that proportion has taken on new significance:
A report released on March 2nd by the Pew Center on
the States found that one in every thirty-one adults reside in the US
corrections system—now totaling some 7.3 million people.
That means roughly one student
per classroom in America will end up in prison, on parole, or on probation.
As New School Foundation board member Lisa Fitzhugh notes in her January 19th Seattle Times op-ed, states like Washington even determine how many prison cells to build based on 4th grade reading scores and graduation rates. So rest assured, if your 9-year-old stumbles over syntax or has trouble sounding out the word “priorities,” the state has readied the necessary cellblock accommodations. Why flush money down the sinkhole of reading improvement teachers when there are solitary confinement cells to be built? As the Pew study reports,
“In the past two decades, state general fund spending on corrections increased by more than 300 percent, outpacing other essential government services from education, to transportation and public assistance. Only Medicaid spending has grown faster. Today, corrections imposes a national taxpayer burden of $68 billion a year.”
In Seattle, where I teach, our politicians have magnified this absurdity by simultaneously proposing two pieces of public policy:
1) Mayor Greg Nickels has proposed the construction of a new municipal jail, projected to cost taxpayers over $200 million.
2) Seattle’s School Board voted recently to close five schools and disrupt or discontinue eight other programs.
If you like these policies of planning prison construction based on elementary reading levels, and of closing schools while opening jails, you might consider a couple of other equally rewarding ventures: smashing holes in your boat and investing in buckets to bail out the water, or, equally clever, slashing holes in the tires of your car and subsequently investing in tire patches.
How do we end this illogical, anti-hope scenario and reverse increases in prison spending?
After years of deregulation and outlandish speculation that caused an implosion of the economy, many politicians and corporate heads are venturing out of their boardrooms to examine the rubble at “Main Street Middle School.” Realizing something must be done, they tout their education schemes as “school reform”—including paying teachers according to culturally biased/curriculum narrowing tests their students take, the breaking of teachers’ unions, and the privatization of education through charter schools.
But in an era when CEOs and bankers sabotage the economy and then get to float to the ground on golden parachutes worth tens of millions of dollars, it’s unclear how merit pay for teachers would be structured—in this new age, would it mean that the more students who flunk the test, the bigger bonuses teachers get?
Given the current free market meltdown, they can’t really believe that our public schools are better off following the laissez-faire predisposition for privatized charter schools run by CEOs.
A genuine first step on the
path to improving education should center on what teachers, students,
and parents have known for a long time: class size matters.
Unfortunately, this common sense approach missed Mayor Bloomberg who was quoted in the New York Times on February 22nd giving his explanation of how to improve education: "It's the teacher looking a child in the eye, and teachers can look lots of children in the eye," he added. "If you have to have smaller class size or better teachers, go with the better teachers every time."
I’ll go for option C: The skilled teacher with the smaller class.
Tennessee’s Project STAR (Student Teacher Achievement Ratio)—the most comprehensive class size study ever conducted—showed students who had been randomly assigned to smaller classes of 13 to 17 students in grades K-3 outperformed their peers in regular classes of 22 to 25 students (and in regular classes with an educational aide). Additionally, by eighth grade, those students who had been placed in small classes through Project STAR were still outperforming students who had been placed in regular classes or regular-plus-aide classes in K-3.
While proven to help, lower class sizes are not popular with the guardians of the bottom line because training and hiring more teachers costs money. I should admit I am not a trained economist like the financial intellectuals who managed asset-backed securities at AIG. However, I feel qualified to assert that unlike the purchase of collateralized debt obligations, spending on our children is a sound investment—morally and financially.
The American Economic Review, one of the longest running journals in the field, recently released a study revealing that only "A one percent increase in the high school completion rate of all men ages 20-60 would save the United States as much as $1.4 billion per year in reduced costs from crime incurred by victims and society at large."
Having missed this statistic,
states across the country are reacting to the financial crisis with
school closures and teacher layoffs. While some of the largest
districts have postponed massive layoffs for now, recently the Los Angeles
Unified Schools threatened 2,300 teachers with pink slips and New York
City Schools said they could lay off 15,000. The Seattle School
District is planning to terminate or disrupt 13 schools, and Chicago
is shuttering 16 of its own. Federal stimulus dollars for education
will help ease some of the cuts, but politicians—from governors to
local school officials—have promised closures and layoffs nonetheless.
Activists in Seattle, however,
are working on an alternative lesson plan for our city that may prove
to be a model for saving schools and halting jails.
Representatives from all the schools slated for closure and other community members have formed ESP Vision: Educators, Students and Parents for a Better Vision of the Seattle Schools—rallying hundreds against the school closures, teaming up with the local NAACP to help parents file over 200 grievances with Department of Education, and assisting parents in a formal appeals process to block the closures. Moreover, ESP Vision has teamed up with the Initiative-100 campaign that is attempting to block the building of a new city jail by collecting the 23,000 signatures needed to put its construction to a vote.
Mark Twain once said, “Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won't fatten the dog.” While Twain leaves us with a distasteful image, far more repugnant is a social order that invests in metal bars rather than in cultivating our children’s talents.
- Posted in
46 Comments so far
Show AllIt's all a part of a corrupt and decaying system. The correlation between internment and quality of education is so obvious that only greed and corruption could mask it. What do I see all around me? Cuts in education, of course. A society that spends more on building and maintaining prisons than it does on schools is headed in the wrong direction. Will we deserve what we get? Afraid so.
The profit motive rears its ugly head, yet again. Like it or not, and obviously I do not, prisons have powerful friends in Congress as well as in State and local govts, schools do not have such backers. This may very well speak to the abysmal and wrongheaded vision of our elected politicos who value campaign funding over the good of the nations future.
But it also speaks to the lack of wisdom of the voting public who returns these greedy and shortsighted individuals to office time and again.
"Most people would sooner die than think, in fact they do so." Bertrand Russell
Sioux Rose
RED RICK: Back in l990 I was visiting NYC and an agent contact had material posted all over her desk for a contest (she was doing the PR that would soon appear in the NY Times) on visions for the future. I took it as an omen that I seldom visit NY in winter and there was the "writer's invitation" right before my eyes, before it even was published.
I meditated a lot on what I wanted to write and one thing that came to me (l990, remember) was a phase of prison building designed largely in the manner of the old Soviet days to lock up the intellectuals. The work seemed like a guided vision and one key theme was that a vast transition would hit the land, and many persons of conscience, progressive college teachers and such, would spend times in prison. Eventually the amassing of great sums of money afforded to the title holders would render them title-givers... that the wealth they had amassed would have to be reconstituted back to the populations it was taken from. The time period of this visionary rendering spanned till 2020. Timewise, we're now in the belly of the beast before the fruit of this transition breathes on its own as new entity.
I see a lot of parallels between what "came through me" in this vision and what is already in place. Prison building is of course cruel, follows the precepts of a nation given to punitive measures. To punish or lock up or use force all accords with Mars and there's no question that the mores resonant with Mars govern our land.
In addition, the largest single bloc of government employees is....prison guards. Couple that fact with the growing commercialisation of prisons and one has a perfect storm of lobbying for more wharehousing of prisoners, less rehabilitation efforts and less forward thinking of our entire penal and justice system.
Can you say WOD?
The next ugly piece of the puzzle is teenage and 20-ish unemployment and borderline McJobs. Promising a kid that he will never be able to support himself, much less his family, is a ticket into prison as a Geritol convict.
Many bad neighborhoods in cities are lead-filled toxic waste dumps. Not good for baby Einstein. Lead also makes kids crazy, but so do soda machines in schools.
I'll mention that school was sometimes torture for me. My seventh grade math teacher regularly whacked the back of my head against a locker for not doing homework. Because I didn't die from a concussion does not make this torture legal or morally right. Where is Amnesty International when an American public school should be closed down for torture?
The other side of th ecoin.
We once locked our Spanish teacher in the wardrobe, where he remained for the entire school day. Did you ever report the guy?
"Most people would sooner die than think, in fact they do so." Bertrand Russell
I don't know how many years ago it was when PaulK's teacher banged his head against the locker, but I know when I was in school, kid torture was a common practice. I was so terrified of what my first grade teacher might do to me for forgetting my workbook, that I became violently sick and had to be taken home. Whatever my fifth grade teacher did to me was so terrible I blanked her and my classmates out of my mind. My only memory of that year is of constantly running from the room and vomiting before I got ten feet away. I can only be certain it wasn't anything physical because I was a veteran of that at home. I never even knew I was blanking it out, but I couldn't have told anyone about it anyway.
Was your school run by a particular religion?
Funny thing...I had an eight grade math teacher who taught with the same methods. No homework or a mispoken word in the classroom called for a smash of the head (several times) into the lockers out in the hallway (after being thrown face first into the lockers to begin with.) Does this kind of behavior still come from "teachers" or have they finally begin hiring teachers who are there to teach and improve the lives of their students rather than get their sadistic ya ya's out?
One cluster bomb would probably be the same amount of money to run a school room for a year. So when our planes and rockets are pelting Afghanistan,etc, visulize those bombs as text books, teachers, teacher's aids, and supplemental materials that burn to ashes when they hit the ground.
Sioux Rose
CURTIS: Wisely stated. Can you send this on as "letter to the editor" in a proximate area if its schools are being shut down?
Growing up, my playground (and science lab) was an eighty acre farm with two large wooded hills, artesian-fed streams, a pond, and so much more. Now what do kids have? Tiny back yards, the streets, parking lots? What do they have for entertainment? I've often thought about being a kid now, and I think I'd probably either go nuts, or on drugs.
As for the schools, I think states and communities should take over and get the polititians out of them.
Twenty years ago I had a vision of future towns of America - A huge WalMart on one end, a huge prison on the other, and shanties in between.
It's easy decry the "tiny back yards" that some kids have, but just as a reminder- many city children have huge urban parks that stretch for miles. That on top of some of the most amazing museums on the planet (if you happen live in New York, Philadelphia, D.C., Chicago or some other big city). Entertainment in that kind of setting is rich with possibilities and often- free!
When I grew up in Baltimore my friends and I used to go to the art museum on sunday afternoons. It was great fun, a great education and free.
In the mid 1980s when visiting my old hometown, a friend asked me to go see an exhibit. As we walked in I was shocked that we stopped at a box office to pay to enter. My friend told me thay had been charging admission for years.
I've made my living as an artist all of these years. I have little doubt that my sunday afternoons at the BAM had a lot to do with my choice of prfession. If they had charged me to enter I couldn't have gone in.
Schools, museums, parks are the things that seperate sucessful societies/economies from third world countries.
"Imagine a world where schools are funded and the Pentagon has to run a bake sale the build a bomber" Maybe the prison builders could set up a "Dunk the Politicians" booth on their building sites. I'm sure supporters of incarceration as a cure-all for social ills will be happy to volunteer.
Sorry to hear about BAM charging an admission fee, now.
D.C. museums are free, Philadelphia's art museum: free on Sundays, NY Metropolitan Museum is "pay-what-you-will", not sure about Chicago's big art museum.
We didn't mention libraries, many of those have art exhibits, too. Not to mention books, magazines, DVDs, and all the rest.
Point being, that children in cities with a bus pass, or walking with loving adult, can access a wealth of experiences, inluding trips to the woods and parks.
It's time to turn off our kids' dang computers and video games!!
Get out there and explore!!
The kind of play where kids are out on their own unsupervised and unobserved making forts in the woods next to creeks and streams may be limited these days, though.
It's up to us to help that happen.
Take a kid for a walk, bring a book along for yourself, then sit down and enjoy!
No structured activity, no competitive sports.
Sounds about perfect to me.
This is far from a new phenomenon. This reminds me of an old story I heard as a kid in Colorado. Canon City competed for the then proposed University of Colorado but got the new State Pen instead. Years later the then mayor stated he was glad they got the prison because it brought more jobs to the town than the university would have.
I've been through Canon City (the town with the Territorial Prison) and the prison industry seems to be the sole employer almost in that town. Not trying to be nasty or anything, but that seems to be probably one of the places I would least like to live out of anywhere I have been, even with the pretty view of the mountains off in the distance. Too depressing.
I only go through Canon City on the way to Royal Gorge anyway.
Starving schools to build prisons? Nobody is stupid enough to consider this a solution. I think maybe this is part of a continuing attempt to keep us ignorant and afraid.
This will change. The question is how and will there be a USA left when it does.
At least in prison you get free health care, food, housing and a job (20 cents/hr). Just a different kind of slavery than being a wage slave having to provide your own food, housing and health care which increase in price faster than wages.
http://flatrock.org.nz/topics/prisons/made_in_the_usa.htm
Also, when I went to school we had 35 kids to a class room and few went to prison, but that was in white middle class suburbia.
Most in prison today are due to drugs which penalize hispanics and african-americans more harshly than whites, and the poor more than the well off. I am not buying the relationship to the number of schools, although shcools in the inner city are certainly worse than in suburbia. Bussing drove out most of the better off white students, so those left behind got equal education, which was no better than before bussing, and it took longer to get to school.
In Mark Twains day, there was no socialized education like today. Only 6% of students graduated from high school in 1900. The reason they did not end up in jail like today is they could work. Jobs keep people out of jail, not schools. Today you have kids graduating from college and 100,000 dollars in debt working as waiters or doing menial jobs, taking jobs away from those who used to do them. Illegal immigration and prison labour suppress wages for these lower level jobs so even working 40 hrs a week does not provide a living wage.
In Mark Twain's day:
Late 1800s: In 1870, the United States prison population is 33,000 out of total population of 39,818,449 — .08 percent of the U.S. population is incarcerated.
1990s: In 1996, there are 518,492 inmates in prison out of a total population of over 265 million — almost 2 percent of the American population. Of these inmates, 228,900, which is approximately half, are African American.
http://www.answers.com/topic/the-sheriff-s-children-story-5
As to working in prison:
http://www.fedcrimlaw.com/visitors/PrisonLore/prison-labor.html
As Prison Labor Grows, So Does the Debate
By DAVID LEONHARDT
OTAY MESA, Calif. -- Behind five barbed-wire fences, four identification checkpoints, two guard towers and one 50,000-volt electric fence sits one of the few remaining solutions to America's tightest labor market in 30 years.
Every weekday, some 100 prisoners report for work at one of three private companies here at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility, a series of squat buildings hidden among the hills at the base of Otay Mountain, just five miles from the Mexican border. The men, convicted murderers and robbers among them, stitch T-shirts, recycle tires and make beer and wine vats.
Other than the workers' uniformly blue outfits and the armed guards who occasionally patrol the factory floors, the workplace looks quite normal. A radio plays the Beatles' "Here Comes the Sun" and Queen's "We Will Rock You." Hunched over sewing machines or welding together stainless steel vats, the men earn about $5.75 an hour, the California minimum wage. The products end up attached to trendy clothing labels like No Fear and in upscale pubs.
With unemployment low and a record number of Americans behind bars, prison labor is coming to mean much more than painting license plates. As inmates undertake everything from telemarketing to the manufacturing of computer circuit boards and furniture, the change has caused a growing debate, playing out in state legislatures and in two bills before Congress, over the role the nation's two million prisoners should play in its economy.
Across the country, more than 80,000 inmates now hold traditional jobs, working for governments or private companies and earning 25 cents to $7 an hour. The private sector programs, which exist in 36 states and employ 3,500, have doubled in size since 1995 after years of almost no growth. And the federal program that employs 21,000 inmates, up 14 percent in the last two years, and that has $600 million in annual sales, is seeking to expand.
Both supporters and opponents agree the debate is at a critical juncture because employment in prisons could spread quickly in the coming years. On virtually every other question, however -- whether prison labor helps inmates or is cruel to them, whether it is an economic benefit or a force holding down wages -- the two sides differ vehemently.
Supporters of the employment of inmates include law enforcement officials who view the programs as a way to reform convicts and business groups who see inexpensive labor. Many prisoners want to work, the backers say, and they point to research showing that inmates who work are less likely to commit crimes when they are released.
"It's a problem for corrections officers to have prisoners without anything constructive to do," said Edwin Meese III, the former United States attorney general, who lobbies for expanded inmate labor as chairman of the Enterprise Prison Institute, a Bethesda, Md., research group financed by state grants, research centers and private companies.
In addition, supporters say, prisoners offer the ultimate in a flexible and dependable work force. "If I lay them off for a week," said Pierre Sleiman, the owner of the T-shirt company at Donovan, referring to his workers, "I don't have to worry about someone else coming and saying, 'Come work for me.' "
To opponents, inmate labor is both a potential human rights abuse and a threat to workers outside prison walls. Inmates have no bargaining power and are easily exploited, the critics say. In one California lawsuit, for example, two prisoners have sued both their employer and the prison, saying they were put in solitary confinement after complaining about working conditions.
The opponents also say the programs have stolen jobs from outside workers and hold down wages for other workers. Inmate labor, said Gordon Lafer, a political science professor at the University of Oregon, "is a decent-sized problem that is poised to explode."
Most of the companies now in the program are small.
Earlier in the 1990's, big companies like AT&T and Microsoft hired inmates, but most backed away after the arrangements were exposed. Some big companies, like the retailer Target, still use suppliers that employ prisoners.
Prison labor in the United States has its roots in the 1800's, when inmates worked for private companies without pay. After hundreds died on the job because of hazardous conditions, unions and prison reformers demanded a halt the practice.
........................................................................
..I wonder at your definition of today's education system as "socialized"....I believe we have "social" education rather than socialized:
http://www.infed.org/biblio/b-soced.htm
Also, all statistics point to higher wages and better jobs for those who complete their education, the higher they go education wise the more they make over the course of their working lives.
Some interesting stuff about education...tables at the end are very informative:
http://ftp.iza.org/dp3216.pdf
"Most people would sooner die than think, in fact they do so." Bertrand Russell
I tell my two kids, school is not the only way to learn. You need to pick up where your school leaves off. I try to be an example, I read a lot but not as much as i used to. We live in a rural area, so yeah, i think they are lucky. We go for walks. Walk through creeks, woods, and back roads. We see flowers. I've been studying herbs and we bought a coloring book with herbs to color with colored pencils.
I told my kids that the books they read should be a little harder than their grade level,at least some of them. They really haven't caught on to this quite yet... But they do read more and more. I only hope that this si enough. Telling them that learning is not just going to school but that they need to be independent learners. Parents have to be available. This is hard. I don't get home till 6:00 or sometimes later. Daddy is not that patient but has been doing better lately. My youngest was having quite a lot of trouble with math and spelling. We've had to really buckle down together and now she has picked up her grades (3rd grade). She gets lots of homework. Sometimes i'm very tired and i't hard to push her and stick with making her do things. She's left handed and we have had to make her practice her hand writing because it's atrocious. The teacher can hardly read her cursive.
Life is more complicated than it used to be. Of course, every generation says that. The question is what are we aiming for?
The world or society we've created doesn't seem to be making us happy.
There are changes coming. They need to come. WE are a work in progress. But it hurts. If you ask me, there are too many different values systems and people with too different goals. The divisions are growing in this country. I don't have an answer to that. But as the divide grows, it becomes more obvious that many do not want to work together as one country anymore. There is a lot of tension.
You can prepare your people for one of two things: a future with employment or prison. I graduated high school in '76v and college in '79. I consider that I got one of the last decent educations in the country, as in 1980 the republicans took over and everything, as well as education, started going down hill. William "I'm a screaming hypocrite" Bennett was the education Czar, and he did what he could to remove everything that wasn't aimed at dumbing down Americans. No more art, no more music, not even any history, just business and football.
A few years later, Colorado, where I live, passed the worst tax bill possible, the so called "taxpayer's bill of rights", or TABOR. It has starved our schools of money to the point where we are now 49th in education spending. Coincidentally, at the same time, we decided that we just HAD to have more prisons, so now we are 3rd in prison spending in the country. An actual conincidence? I am not so sure.
For over 20 years, now, I have been saying that the republicans won't be happy until half of us are in prison and the other half is guarding that 50%. It's the republican's full employment program. Unfortunately, we are well on the way to getting just such a country. it's just not a society, anymore.
Like they said on a bumper sticker years ago, you can't plan for war and hope for peace at the same time. For the last 28 years, we have had those in charge who OWN the companies that profit off of arresting people. At the same time, they have passed laws that make every infraction something to be locked up for. As a result, we have "three strikes' laws that cost us millions every year for warehousing humans like it's some kind of baseball game.
We can either keep locking people up for minor things, or we can go back to a system where the gov't runs jails and prisons and restore some sense of justice to the country. If we didn't spend the $64 MILLION in my state just for locking people up for cannabis, for instance, we could educate our kids and give them a future instead of prison to look forward to.
You can't lock up more people than any other country in the world and call yourselves a free country. The two are mutually exclusive. Don't let your congress people tell you we are a free country. We are no such thing. We have officially entered into the police state territory. It's just taken long enough that no one seemed to notice.
It's time to end this nonsense and get back to running a SOCIETY again. 28 years under republicans has ruined us for another generation. May they NEVER hold power here again.
so very true..well said
BTW, this is what happens when you put poeple in power who advertise that they hate gov't and don't think that it does anything worthwhile. Under them, it doesn't work, and it doesn't do anything worthwhile.
And isn't it funny how those same people will fight for months and years to stay in a job they supposedly hate?
Put people in those offices who have a sense of pubic duty, of belief in doing GOOD for the people, and you stand a chance. Keep those in power who have proven that they hate the public, they hate gov't, they have no national belief, and you will end up with nothing but more of what we have now.
And don't kid yourleves, the republicans (and a fair number of Democrats, too) HATE this country. They hate the public, they have no idea of common good, they hate children and having to help out each other like we were a real country. Theirs is a self fulfilling prophecy, just like I knew it would be when Reagan stood up in front of us all and said that it's okay and even your RIGHT to hate whoever you wanted to. No need to get along, he told us, it's just fine to hate your neighbors, minorities, or anyone other than those few that yo ucan identify with immediately. And look where we are now as a result.
Time to get rid of the constant hatred and bad mouthing of our own people, and it's time to get rid of anyone who espouses such a foolish, even suicidal way of life. ESPECIALLY if those people are supposed leaders.
WSM, well said, in both posts. I graduated the same year as you and agree, the educational system in this country (along with just about everything else, especially individual liberty) has gone downhill drastically. In fact, if I had been living in a foreign country since the seventies and just moved back, I'm not sure I would recognize the U.S. as the same country I had moved from thirty some years ago. And yes, it is way past time to get rid of the hatred and anger at each other. We need to come together and work as friends and neighbors and stop allowing those whose goals are self serving and not necessarily in our collective best interests to divide us and weaken our power to resist them and keep them from aquiring power over our lives (politicians and corporate world/financial leaders.)
This article relates directly to the other on "Parental leave for parents" . This is all tied together. It is not rocket science.
Schools should be where students come to learn and not just learn skills that will make them "Good Workers".
Nor should they be a place to store the kids while both parents are off working 12 hours a day just to provide them with shelter and something to eat.
And how many kids will decide to STAY in school when they see their University educated father working as a janitor because his job was outsourced to China?
If people think the prison population bad now, just wait another decade.
Nor should they be a place to store the kids while both parents are off working 12 hours a day just to provide them with shelter and something to eat.
... Helen Keller couldn't see or hear, and was still a socialist.
Millions upon millions of Americans can SEE and HEAR and still think it is a good idea to bring more human beings onto this Earth.
Will somebody please, give me ONE good reason why this world needs one more human being?
And please don't tell me "So they can cure cancer!" Give. Me. A. Fucking. Break.
Until we can figure out how to live sustainably and peacefully (you know, instead of focusing our resources on what percentage of another planet contains water particles... or used to, or other stupid B.S.)--- We don't need anymore people.
Come on folks-- One reason. ..... because it is in our nature? .... Funny, the more educated/enlightened women are.... the more inclined they are to re-think motherhood. At this moment in time--- It makes perfect sense.
>>Until we can figure out how to live sustainably and peacefully (you know, instead of focusing our resources on what percentage of another planet contains water particles... or used to, or other stupid B.S.)--- We don't need anymore people.
Well i sort of think a new generation replacing the old is a GOOD idea. I would rather not see a world of ever increasing life expectancies where a DICK Cheney lives for 140 years and is running things.
It tends to be the younger generation that brings new ideas to the table.
So the reason we need ONE more HUMAN being is to replace the subhumans like Rush Limbaugh, Anne Coulter and The like.
raytheon has a full parking lot...of fools
caravan insurance
You guys don't get it. Progressive is rooted in the word Progress, which we are seeing,
In an Epiphany of Enlightenment & Vision we're seeing the conjoining of the State University System and Corrections. Are they not the same?
Campuses undergoing renovation Cal State Pelican Bay, The University of Folsom and The University of Colorado for Federal Students.
Scholarships cover full tuition in a wide range of studies insuring development of the critical thinking and analytical skills tomorrow's success story will embody, classes include Techniques in Homicide, Raping for Fun & Pleasure, & Metal Shop, where ice-picks, razors, shivs, shanks and other instruments of Killing are forged.
Yes Forged! Tommorow's Parolee Student will be ready to face Life's challenges. Two Strikes, Ganged-Up, Tattoo Covered and with LOTS of New Friends.
And, Enrollment is MANDATORY.
Where all the flowers have gone.
Joe.
azjoe---
A bit nihilistic, but close to the truth.
Meanwhile, I am struck by the other comments above and how we nearly all seem to have been negatively impacted by our "educational system." I consider it a reflection of the larger issues, through which we vest our future. Our entire political system is now totally dysfunctional but we grind day to day because we have no alternative model. I know it. My neighbors all know it. They go through the motions of getting their kids to "school," but for what?
"A Modest Proposal." Start eating English babies. Start by skewering Gordon Brown. That would be an education. Or, in the alternative, jail anyone showing signs of aphasia, as the capacity for language is not required to break rocks or dig ditches.
Was Pol Pot right? Was Mao? We stare ourselves into the abyss. Meanwhile, at a certain level we are all mathematicians. Seven billion brains with no real solutions. In this digital universe will we be saved when two plus two equals five? I doubt it. Humans are creatures of Evolution, and Empericism ought to guide our conduct.
My father attended a one-room midwestern rural school and went on to a PhD. But that was another time in America.
-30-
Hello OldManRiver,
My father ran away from a boarding school, an 8th grader, in 1925, and headed to the Chicago area durng he depression.
He taught engineering at UCLA during WW2.
Then a la The Sting, morphed into a con-man, Slick, w/ a suit, too smart and offers peole could not refuse.
Eff Pol Pot, Sharon, Hitler, Bush & Cheney.
In my opinion, Marx described what I am experiencing. The class-warfare and consolidation of wealth. The fracturing, ever poorer, middle and lower 'classes'
The rape will continue until Rush, George and a million of their friends get their throats cut one fine day. I'll help.
And America has the first Industrial Capitalist Revolution in History,
That would be too cool, Joe.
Private schools plus a voucher system...it's the solution because classes are smaller. Non-public school students consistently outperform their counterparts..mystery solved.
Kick-the-can, dirt clod fights, radios made from string and tin cans, playing cards against spokes, Cliff note term papers, get home before dark or the "talk" in the woodshed, Big Hunk candy bars,downing RC cola while riding with no hands,baseball games where everybody played after a draft process involving good players first bad players last OK fine, games where you shared your mitt with another guy and everybody used the same bat, what uniforms?, and we didn't need adults to tell us how to have fun....
Peace.
Private schools and vouchers omit the poor and working classes from the benefits of education. Vouchers are nothing less than welfare for the rich who send their children to those private academies.
I believe that, while in need of repair, our system of public education is a great strength of this nation and should never be abandoned.
"Most people would sooner die than think, in fact they do so." Bertrand Russell
Actually, I think home-schooled kids do best... I know I did...
Mr Hogapian's approach to an improved,updated school system is laudable. However, I think that he's missing something. The inevitable collapse of our economic system, which will be disastorous for our job market, will create a tremendous surge to the "bottom-rung" jobs, i.e.dishwashers, agricultual workers, car washer etc, that are now largely performed by the "illegals". When the scramble for "any type of work" becomes violent enough, it will become politically expediant to make a REAL effort to send them home.
So, even though it sounds very un-AMERICAN, we're going to need millions of workers that will be happy with a job on the lowest rung of the "job ladder".
And that's what I think is in our leader's longrange vision; no matter what is spouted pubicly, this is reality.
It's my opinion that we won't tremendous improvements in our educational system until the workers std of living is reduced to a point that the capitalists can make $$$$$$ by building modern factories here to compete globally.
Try putting the incentives (and disincentives) in the right place, and things will turn around. Who cares how much money you can make - is that really important to any society? Did it help us get universal single-payer healthcare? No? Well screw that. What if parents got say... $1000 bonus if their kid could read above grade level? Do you think they'd take an interest in junior's progress at school? (Not if they were already rich, but then they'd already be interested in the education of their children...)
How about firing most of the extraneous school staff and having older students take over their jobs - OJT - and get paid a wage commensurate with the child's age? We worked in school when I was a kid - everybody had to, regardless of your parents' wealth - or lack thereof...
How about split-classes, with 4th and 6th together, for instance, so older kids could help the younger ones master their favorite subject? Worked in my school. (Of course, it was advantageous to have a dad that taught chemistry and physics both on the kitchen table and in the garages - and a multilingual mother who taught social studies and history) Combined classes work - they don't ask for your age in college... just your interest and ability.
There are lots of good solutions to basic education - it's just that Dewey didn't want an educated (informed) populace because they're so much harder to manipulate. Do they teach that in American schools? Europeans know that the victors dictate the history to be taught - in fact, the entire curriculum - as Hitler said to his detractors "Your children will know nothing else..." But in small countries, it's pretty hard to hide the truth - your neighbor lives in another country, which has an alternate perspective. Isolation is America's biggest problem - and parochialism.
Want to fix the prison system? Go to Scandinavia and study their systems. See what works before investing the first dime - and who profits.
As a conscientious builder, I am aware of the influence that a structure has on the consciousness of the inhabitants...
I find it interesting that the same architectural firms that designed many of the dormatories and buildings on grade school and university campuses in the 1950's were the same firms that designed the prisons...
Rectalinear Cinder-block and currogated steel mega-structures that were alienating, uncomfortable, inefficient, and soul-crushing places for visitors and inhabitants alike...
there was also a recent relevant article in the NYTIMES: "Prison Spending Outpaces All but Medicaid":
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/us/03prison.html?_r=1&ref=us
mostly concerning the expense of the US prison system; but what i find disturbing is that there are more people in prison in this country than any other country in the world, even China...according to the Economist Intelligence Unit (London), our % of population imprisoned is higher than any other country in the world, even repressive countries like Belarus...
what is wrong here? why do we have status as the world's top police state?
I'd enjoy seeing profit redefined in moral terms, if not social worth and not value capitalism.
Articles such as this remind us that it's just one huge, oversized third world country now. How could such a country achieve first world status again? Let's just say for now that there are no easy or even moderately difficult ways, only very, very difficult ways.
tremaine asks..."How could such a country achieve first world status again?"
By wresting control of government from the hands of a few, very wealthy and very powerful people who have devoted their lives to making a profit at the expense of the common person.
rjs writes... "what is wrong here? why do we have status as the world's top police state?
Because in America corporations have highjacked our political system by sponsoring candidates who will implement mandatory sentences, throw more poor people in jail and build more private prisons while promising everyone the whole time that they will get ‘tough on crime’.
Judges have been caught collecting commissions from prisons for giving minor offenders lengthy sentences (Re: Amy Goodman, Jailing Kids for Cash http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/02/18-10).
Increased airport security has done next to nothing to limit terrorism, however it has been a huge cash cow for the government busting people for minor drug offences and throwing away the key. Over 80% of drug enforcement agencies in the U.S. are ‘self-funding’ meaning they seize all assets during a drug bust regardless of how minor the offence is.
Public education is despised by America’s elite as it is considered a threat to their wealth as it drains the public treasury of money that might otherwise be dished out (corporate welfare) to that small group of predatory corporations that have brought us nuclear weapons, war and environmental devastation. All in the name of “keeping us safe”.
Anyone who has had the chance to travel to more developed countries (i.e. Japan. Holland, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, France, Canada, Australia) will immediately find that the populace abroad is less illiterate, better educated, more worldly and better read. However all of these countries consider education a basic right that should not be undermined by corporate objectives. Americans on the other hand embrace corporate ideology believing such myths as “corporations create lots of jobs” or “what’s good for GM is good for America!” These companies have moulded our educational system through narrow-minded, profit-oriented policies while excluding rational debate and objective thinking right from kindergarten to post graduate programs. These same companies have crept into the schools classrooms, curriculum’s and hallways championing everything from Coca and fast food to the honor of serving your country by enlisting in the military so that you may hone your killing skills in our quest for global empire.
Frankly I’m amazed that we still have a shell of a public school system still in place.
Well stated...
Lest we forget, Cuba has a higher literacy rate than does the USA.