Wisconsin is raising hell in its attempts to balance a budget that's heavily weighed down by union-bargained benefits for public employees. Of course, they're taking the "nuke it from orbit" approach and removing collective bargaining rights from public employees
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The unions don't only protect your pay, they protect you from power-tripping assholes. :P
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Incompetent? Perhaps as good stewards of the public trust. But then, if they were good stewards of the public trust they wouldn't have gotten elected. The public service unions would see to that.
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I am curious whether your complaints will parallel liberal complaints about corporate influence on elections.
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The biggest problem, then, is voters who want the policy equivalent of calorie-free ice cream.
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And yes, how much is enough? People complain about education spending without putting forth any ideas about the most efficient way to run our system.
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Our system does include local accountability. School boards are in charge. The main problem is that local governments can't do anything right.
But anyway, our system isn't actually that bad, if you aren't poor.
"The most recent results (2006) showed the following: students in U.S. schools where the poverty rate was less than 10 percent ranked first in reading, first in science, and third in math. When the poverty rate was 10 percent to 25 percent, U.S. students still ranked first in reading and science. But as the poverty rate rose still higher, students ranked lower and lower. Twenty percent of all U.S. schools have poverty rates over 75 percent. The average ranking of American students reflects this. The problem is not public schools; it is poverty. And as dozens of studies have shown, the gap in cognitive, physical, and social development between children in poverty and middle-class children is set by age three."Reply
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No, I'm not happy with the divergence in results - and the corresponding inequality of opportunity - but it's important to understand the problem. Even with those federal and state standards, those teachers' unions, those school boards, and all that jazz, most American schools finish at the top of the rankings. That means the problem is fundamentally different from what you are complaining about. Perhaps our education would eventually fix itself if we could address poverty.
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And obviously this is a self-perpetuating cycle.
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Oh, then you want GA, where educational control is on the county level, ensconced with the County Board of Education. OK.
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