Individual schools and therefore individual teachers need parents because both need students. Even with the wastefulness of the state, even they won't waste money on teachers who are sitting around doing nothing because there's no students.
Parents have a lot of options. They can pull their kids out of a particular school. They can move to be in a better school area. They can choose a catholic school or a private school. They can even homeschool. Teachers are not entitled to do whatever the hell they want, especially not as agents of the state. A lot of people forget that schools are state institutions and teachers are state employees who get access to people's children by government fiat.
There's a lot of reasons to exercise those options.
There are American cities where the overwhelming majority get a piece of paper saying they graduated from high school but the kids can't read, or write, or do arithmetic, or balance a budget, or do their taxes. Some people say that's because of COVID lockdowns (implemented by the state and endorsed by teachers unions), but things were looking pretty dire before COVID. It's gotten worse, but it's gone from bad to worse.
Despite the absolute failure at the one thing that the schools are supposed to be there to do in the first place, many teachers waste time promoting their pet political causes and various pathological social contagions. In other words, state actors who have people's kids by mandate of the state and paid for by taxpayer dollars are using their privileged position to indoctrinate children politically. It doesn't even matter which indoctrination it is -- neither left wing indoctrination nor right wing indoctrination are acceptable to many people under such circumstances. Teachers ought to be spending that time achieving their core mission of preparing students for the long lives ahead of them.
We're in a global economy. It isn't the postwar period where every other country on earth had bombed itself to smithereens. Take a look at what schools in societies that aren't suicidal like the west are teaching their kids, and compare it to what the supposedly enlightened west considers an acceptable standard. The level of mathematics, of science, of reading and writing, of foreign languages. It's no wonder people from many of those cultures are outcompeting westerners overwhelmingly by every metric. They're tightening up their standards and we're loosening ours.
The best teachers I ever had weren't the teachers I liked the most. Often, the teachers infuriated me, because while many of the teachers I liked the best were lax and let me coast to top marks, the best teachers I had were tough and forced me to become more prepared for what the future brings. One computer teacher was the only teacher to ever push back on my tech skills and point out if I couldn't balance those with soft skills then they were worthless. One was such a pain, she forced me to neatly show all my work so it could be understood by someone else. Guess what? That's a professional skill and a life skill as painful as learning it was. One report writing teacher forced me to throw all my bullshit English classes out the window and tighten up my writing to be concise (he says in the post that's too long didn't read). Not one of the best teachers I ever had had time to indoctrinate me into their political worldview because there isn't a lot of time and there's a lot of material to cover.
And if teachers aren't pushing my son to excel like that, then they aren't working for me and I have no use for them. I'll homeschool if I have to because it's a competitive world out there and I'm a failure if I let him fail just because it was too much work to help him succeed in life.
In total, Arizona's recent switch to a set educational stipend for children seems like a home run to me. Schools will have to compete for dollars they aren't automatically entitled to, and if the public school system can't deliver the level of service parents demand, then alternatives can be directly funded with that money instead of parents and kids being forced into a system that has no incentive to excel.
One of the biggest things I'd be concerned with is the obvious free rider problem. Money is a fungible commodity, so how do you prove that the money set aside for a hypothetical child's education is being spend on education and not on a parents own selfish desires? I think that it would be inequal not in terms of socioeconomics but in terms of the quality of the parents who are given that power. An economically poor and socially disadvantaged parent who nonetheless cares deeply for their child could spend the money on a great education, but an economically rich and socially privileged parent could take the money and piss it away on nonsense (or on something actively harmful) and the kid in the early example would get a benefit and the kid in the latter example would be harmed. Unfortunately, we have to give parents the benefit of the doubt despite that. Notwithstanding school there are good parents and bad parents and we know from the literature that the effect is so overwhelming that everyone who cares should be screaming from the rooftops for fathers to stay with mothers and to be actively engaged in early childhood development.
Parents have a lot of options. They can pull their kids out of a particular school. They can move to be in a better school area. They can choose a catholic school or a private school. They can even homeschool. Teachers are not entitled to do whatever the hell they want, especially not as agents of the state. A lot of people forget that schools are state institutions and teachers are state employees who get access to people's children by government fiat.
There's a lot of reasons to exercise those options.
There are American cities where the overwhelming majority get a piece of paper saying they graduated from high school but the kids can't read, or write, or do arithmetic, or balance a budget, or do their taxes. Some people say that's because of COVID lockdowns (implemented by the state and endorsed by teachers unions), but things were looking pretty dire before COVID. It's gotten worse, but it's gone from bad to worse.
Despite the absolute failure at the one thing that the schools are supposed to be there to do in the first place, many teachers waste time promoting their pet political causes and various pathological social contagions. In other words, state actors who have people's kids by mandate of the state and paid for by taxpayer dollars are using their privileged position to indoctrinate children politically. It doesn't even matter which indoctrination it is -- neither left wing indoctrination nor right wing indoctrination are acceptable to many people under such circumstances. Teachers ought to be spending that time achieving their core mission of preparing students for the long lives ahead of them.
We're in a global economy. It isn't the postwar period where every other country on earth had bombed itself to smithereens. Take a look at what schools in societies that aren't suicidal like the west are teaching their kids, and compare it to what the supposedly enlightened west considers an acceptable standard. The level of mathematics, of science, of reading and writing, of foreign languages. It's no wonder people from many of those cultures are outcompeting westerners overwhelmingly by every metric. They're tightening up their standards and we're loosening ours.
The best teachers I ever had weren't the teachers I liked the most. Often, the teachers infuriated me, because while many of the teachers I liked the best were lax and let me coast to top marks, the best teachers I had were tough and forced me to become more prepared for what the future brings. One computer teacher was the only teacher to ever push back on my tech skills and point out if I couldn't balance those with soft skills then they were worthless. One was such a pain, she forced me to neatly show all my work so it could be understood by someone else. Guess what? That's a professional skill and a life skill as painful as learning it was. One report writing teacher forced me to throw all my bullshit English classes out the window and tighten up my writing to be concise (he says in the post that's too long didn't read). Not one of the best teachers I ever had had time to indoctrinate me into their political worldview because there isn't a lot of time and there's a lot of material to cover.
And if teachers aren't pushing my son to excel like that, then they aren't working for me and I have no use for them. I'll homeschool if I have to because it's a competitive world out there and I'm a failure if I let him fail just because it was too much work to help him succeed in life.
In total, Arizona's recent switch to a set educational stipend for children seems like a home run to me. Schools will have to compete for dollars they aren't automatically entitled to, and if the public school system can't deliver the level of service parents demand, then alternatives can be directly funded with that money instead of parents and kids being forced into a system that has no incentive to excel.
One of the biggest things I'd be concerned with is the obvious free rider problem. Money is a fungible commodity, so how do you prove that the money set aside for a hypothetical child's education is being spend on education and not on a parents own selfish desires? I think that it would be inequal not in terms of socioeconomics but in terms of the quality of the parents who are given that power. An economically poor and socially disadvantaged parent who nonetheless cares deeply for their child could spend the money on a great education, but an economically rich and socially privileged parent could take the money and piss it away on nonsense (or on something actively harmful) and the kid in the early example would get a benefit and the kid in the latter example would be harmed. Unfortunately, we have to give parents the benefit of the doubt despite that. Notwithstanding school there are good parents and bad parents and we know from the literature that the effect is so overwhelming that everyone who cares should be screaming from the rooftops for fathers to stay with mothers and to be actively engaged in early childhood development.
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