Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
The Real Baltimore
Kim Klacik is a Republican running for Congress in Baltimore, and she has a few things to say. Warning: pearl clutchers should have pearls handy before watching this campaign ad:
While Nancy makes selfie-videos of her $30 a pint designer ice cream, Kim Klacik is shaking up her old home town. Sometimes the revolution that arises is not the one the elites were staging. A race worth following. Donate here.
As you were.
Published in Elections
Oh, he got it.
But there are only 50 students left, and you don’t need TWO teachers for 50 students if you’re putting 50 students with a teacher. So with one teacher, one principle, and one superintendent, splitting $7500 they each get the same amount as before. But really you don’t need a principle AND a superintendent for ONE teacher. And if you scale it up more reasonably, the numbers get better, not worse.
Not sure. But I don’t know what/who “Shakin’ Stevens” is either.
They can learn to code?
Exactly, you can’t have the same number of employees for the numbers to improve. That’s my point.
The no-longer-needed public school teacher can go to the charter school and teach those 50 kids, or fewer, and get paid more for it since the charter school is likely to have less administrative bloat.
That’s kind of a “duh” isn’t it? You expected the charter school to handle 50 more kids without hiring another teacher? c’mon. Are you voting for Biden, too?
See my response to TBA.
Who says you need the same number of employees for less work? Unions, sure. But nobody else I can think of.
Sorry, my expertise is porn, not… “popular?”… music.
We need charter schools, in part, because teachers aren’t doing their jobs. Certainly in many cases it isn’t their fault. But in many cases it is.
Well sure, but those teachers aren’t owed a job teaching just because that may be what they want to do. Or may be what they can get paid the most to NOT do, thanks to unions etc.
(P.S. My prediction is that they would suck at coding, too.)
Owed a job? Heavens no! Well, not in my book. Laws may differ.
The singer of “Green Door.”
She is a general. Have no doubt if she ordered her followers to kill you they would gleefully do so
Man, I’d work on her campaign if she was in Chicago.
I think the outfit is perfect. It just reinforces the necessary message that women are women and there’s no harm if they want to play up their femininity. (At least it’s not one of Elizabeth Warren’s cardigans…)
OK, that’s certainly a reasonable position to take, but getting back to my original point about charter school funding, I also think it’s reasonable to point out that, all else equal, moving kids out of traditional public schools and into charter schools will reduce funding for public schools. You and I may agree that is the right thing to do but I can certainly understand how the unions would be against it.
It seems like some kind of lefty thing to believe that reducing funding by 33% while reducing student load by 50%, for example, is “bad.” That amounts to an x% INCREASE in per-student funding, which is what they always say they want. It’s like when they say a 33% increase when they wanted a 50% increase, is a “cut.” Regular people don’t believe that kind of nonsense.
I can’t tell who’s arguing what side here, but…
School systems constantly adjust to varying student populations. They add teachers, they lay off teachers, they reassign teachers to different schools, or different school districts, they add portable classrooms, they remove them, etc. I know several school buildings where I have lived that have been repurposed into community centers.
Also (since the topic is Baltimore) know that Baltimore’s population has been declining significantly since 1950-something.
There’s that too. Although they tend to keep – or even add more – administrators even as they shed teachers.
Except that poor black mothers spend hours in school lotteries, see Waiting for Superman, and are crushed when their children do not get one of the coveted slots in a quality school.
Trump won by advocating for working class and poor Americans against both Democrats and Bush Republicans shipping jobs to China and letting illegal and legal immigrants crowd out jobs and depress wages. Hence the unrelenting opposition since his nomination by both Democrats and Bush Republicans.
You have a fair point that (Bush) Republicans, to the extent they bother pitching education reform, do so in a way that is tone deaf and ineffective. You could also make the point about our senior generations, starting with groups like the Grey Panthers, vehemently opposing any change to senior benefit programs (Social Security, Medicare) because they fear any change will be for the worse for them. This is why Trump has loudly, unconditionally opposed any change to Social Security.
You have no idea what is required of teachers if you think one teacher should be responsible for 50 kids.
My reccommendation: Toss the super, toss the admin, hire 3 teachers and save money. Oh, and the job actually gets done. 😁
I didn’t create the hypothetical. But if you assume 100 students and 2 teachers, that works out to 50 students per teacher. I didn’t invent simple math, either.
Put another way: your argument, to the extent you may have one, is with FloppyDisk90, not me.
If legislatures would make schools less subject to lawsuits, admin would make teachers less accountable for ‘lesson plan writing’, and parents made children more responsible for their failures I imagine things would improve.
Oh, and fire every other admin person. Honestly, it looks like a turn-of-the-other-century graft machine.
Dissolve the US Department of Education and rescind the web of associated regulations, executive orders, and “dear colleague letters” to restore subsidiarity in education. Then let the cash strapped jurisdictions do the rest.
I think you guys do not understand current education. It is not really about teaching / indoctrinating children. That is just an excuse, a reason for existence. It is more about mining administrative law for money for the school system. That is why you need so many administrators, to comply, to work, to justify, to find all those little places to shake money out of the various government and their departments.
A singer. First time I heard the song it was the Jim Lowe version.
True, and Lowe recorded it first.
It all comes down to unions believing they are owed a job and a certain pay. Where lower funding makes that untenable, to them the solution is NOT to fire anyone. If they thought firings were acceptable, we wouldn’t be in the position of having useless teachers fake-teaching students to (not) read.
I’d like to point out… it seems the most dysfunctional attitudes on teaching and unions and public schooling is coming from administrators and higher degree holders. It seems there’s a decent enough mix among lower teachers to make it battle worthy that the school administrations and bureaucrats in education are improperly utilizing the money that is earmarked for the schools.
When teachers complain of lack of funding, it’s less about needing taxes to go up, but for administrator pay to drop so more money goes into the classrooms.
It doesn’t look like these younger teachers have as much union power as the older members with more advanced degrees have.
In other words, there may be enough fracture there for some limited working together.
The education administration and bureaucracy needs a haircut. With all the money we dump into schools, there is no reason why teachers should be paying out of pocket for school supplies.