I'm about 15 minutes in and I'm not sure I will be able to finish. The school board member from Flagler County (which is just north of where I grew up) is absolutely insufferable and describes, for me at least, the adjective "knee jerk" in that near the very beginning she raised Democrats' very favorite talking point: Not enough funding …
I'm about 15 minutes in and I'm not sure I will be able to finish. The school board member from Flagler County (which is just north of where I grew up) is absolutely insufferable and describes, for me at least, the adjective "knee jerk" in that near the very beginning she raised Democrats' very favorite talking point: Not enough funding for education and that the Republicans have ruined everything. I remember not terribly long ago a study published that illustrated the vast funding differences between U.S. schools and European schools, which clearly illustrated that Americans shovel a ton of $$ at school systems for rather lackluster results. And they keep asking for more! In the woulda/shoulda/coulda department, I neglected to save the source for that study - so my bad, I don't have a statistical leg to stand on. But then shortly thereafter, the much maligned Tiffany Justice made an absolutely commonsense observation that resonated with me: She noted that "increase school funding" rarely trickles down to the classroom and instead is gobbled up by administrative bloat - which I can tell you from personal knowledge is absolutely true! How do I know this? My sis is an administrative assistant in one of those large Florida districts. People don't know this but because school systems in Florida are administered on the county level, they tend to be massive bureaucracies. The schools themselves tend to be enormous: My own Florida high school class had almost 1,000 people. But I digress because my point was about my sister's job - she supports a boatload of highly paid specialists, who have risen up through the ranks to the point where they don't spend time in actual classrooms anymore. There's a few people like my sister, and a whole bunch of "them," people who (it seemed to me) spent their entire work lives attending meetings and giving PowerPoints. Many of those meetings were in other parts of the state, so there was a lot of travel expense involved in their "sharing expertise." The PowerPoints that my sister was in charge of assembling and disseminating were enormous. This particular district has had multiple rounds of layoffs in recent decades, and it always seems to me (yes, I am a distant observer!) that the poor teachers... where "the rubber meets the road" ... always took it on the chin in those cuts. Nobody at this bloated administrative level ever lost his/her job, which was also my experience in corporate America where upper management types always had each other's backs. Consider that this is just one school system in one state, then multiply this syndrome across America and you have a prescription for failure led by babbling, over-credentialed bureaucrats.
I'm about 15 minutes in and I'm not sure I will be able to finish. The school board member from Flagler County (which is just north of where I grew up) is absolutely insufferable and describes, for me at least, the adjective "knee jerk" in that near the very beginning she raised Democrats' very favorite talking point: Not enough funding for education and that the Republicans have ruined everything. I remember not terribly long ago a study published that illustrated the vast funding differences between U.S. schools and European schools, which clearly illustrated that Americans shovel a ton of $$ at school systems for rather lackluster results. And they keep asking for more! In the woulda/shoulda/coulda department, I neglected to save the source for that study - so my bad, I don't have a statistical leg to stand on. But then shortly thereafter, the much maligned Tiffany Justice made an absolutely commonsense observation that resonated with me: She noted that "increase school funding" rarely trickles down to the classroom and instead is gobbled up by administrative bloat - which I can tell you from personal knowledge is absolutely true! How do I know this? My sis is an administrative assistant in one of those large Florida districts. People don't know this but because school systems in Florida are administered on the county level, they tend to be massive bureaucracies. The schools themselves tend to be enormous: My own Florida high school class had almost 1,000 people. But I digress because my point was about my sister's job - she supports a boatload of highly paid specialists, who have risen up through the ranks to the point where they don't spend time in actual classrooms anymore. There's a few people like my sister, and a whole bunch of "them," people who (it seemed to me) spent their entire work lives attending meetings and giving PowerPoints. Many of those meetings were in other parts of the state, so there was a lot of travel expense involved in their "sharing expertise." The PowerPoints that my sister was in charge of assembling and disseminating were enormous. This particular district has had multiple rounds of layoffs in recent decades, and it always seems to me (yes, I am a distant observer!) that the poor teachers... where "the rubber meets the road" ... always took it on the chin in those cuts. Nobody at this bloated administrative level ever lost his/her job, which was also my experience in corporate America where upper management types always had each other's backs. Consider that this is just one school system in one state, then multiply this syndrome across America and you have a prescription for failure led by babbling, over-credentialed bureaucrats.