Newsgroups: alt.politics.elections
Subject: Re: RE: Liberal v. Conservative
Date: 16 Aug 92  01:14:58 EST

Reply-To: cedman@golem.ps.uci.edu (Carl Edman)

Joseph Gownder writes
> Now that's a laughable notion.  While I admit that the
> Democratic Party has, in the past, pandered to teachers
> unions by rolling back qualification requirements,
> Clinton (and advisor Robert Reich) has made education a 
> high priority.  School choice -- the Republican plan -- is
> not without some merit, but I ask, how do the Republicans
> expect to improve education in the country if they are
> unwilling to FUND it?  $600m for head start sounds nice,
> but it's a drop in the bucket.  I suspect that if we are going
> to allow equal opportunity and educate children in the
> inner city to the point where they can compete with, say,
> Japanese schoolchildren,  we're going to have to pump
> billions of dollars into the system. 

Well, I hate run this same debate again and again and again, but here it goes.  
Educational spending in this country _already_ is enormous. Total educational  
spending is almost twice the total military spending in this country. The US  
spends more per pupil on education than any other nation on earth with the  
exception of Switzerland. At the same time american pupils perform at the  
bottom of the western world. Money is _not_ the problem. General contempt for  
education on part of the educational establishment run by the teachers unions  
and their ally, the Democratic party, is. No amount of additional money is  
going to change this without major structural changes in the educational system  
which take control of education out of the hands of these groups. And the only  
viable proposal to achieve that _is_ school choice.

> Case in point: Pete Wilson wants to CUT $1b from the
> California state education budget.  Yes, one billion
> dollars.  I wonder what that will do to public education in
> California?

Above you refered (quite rightly) to $600 million as a drop in the bucket  
compared to the rest of educational spending. So is $1000 million in the  
largest state of the union. And it won't do anything to education in  
california. 

> Education should be sacrosanct.  But the Republicans
> must also realize that in order to educate
> under-privileged children, we must give them tools to
> overcome some of the social problems facing them and
> their "families."This means more counselling in
> schools, more social workers, and education  about sex,
> AIDS, and pregnancy prevention.  How can we promote
> "family  values" in this country when more than half of our
> 13 year-olds are having sex... and while many of them are
> having children out of wedlock because there is no sex
> education?  You decide. 

That attitude is _exactly_ the problem. The reason that the huge amount of  
which the US spends on education has so little effect, is not that teachers are  
paid too much. As a matter of fact, american teachers are paid very little in  
comparison with what teachers in some other western nations are paid. (On the  
other hand, the educational system gets what it pays for, in this case the  
dregs of the college educated population who hardly deserve to be paid more.).  
The problem is that too little of the education funds actually goes to genuine  
education. Administrative overhead is enormous. From what remains all kinds of  
social services which you advocate but have absolutely nothing to do with  
education are funded. And from what little money actually reaches the class  
room the teachers find themselves ideologically and intellectually quite  
incapable to make better use of than to fritter it away on insubstantial  
unchallenging feel-good programs. And your proposals would not improve that by  
a long shot.

	Carl Edman


 * Origin: Gated from uucp to Fidonet by FredGate (1:112/28.0)