"Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate"
Andrew Mellon to Herbert Hoover - 1929.
The Republican Party has declared war on our nations children. According to an article in today's New York Times this is the result:
One Central Texas district, Dripping Springs, reduced its custodial staff and has relied on teachers to pick up the slack. Janitors now visit the classrooms every other day, leaving teachers to clean and sweep their rooms on the off days. Off day or on, teachers also must collect their trash and set it in the hallway, part of custodial changes aimed at saving the district $149,000.
To cut $1.5 million, the Northwest district in the Fort Worth area also stopped busing students who live within a two-mile walk of their school. “It’s buses or teachers, and we’re choosing teachers,” said the superintendent, Karen G. Rue. “That’s what it came down to, plain and simple.”
In Hutto, a district with 5,600 students and one high school, administrators cut $4 million from this school year’s budget, eliminating 68 positions and taking the unusual step of temporarily shutting one of its elementary schools. The school, Veterans’ Hill Elementary, will stay closed for two years to save the district $1 million annually, and its 500 students, including two of the superintendent’s children, were sent to other schools. The only way to transfer the students was to take another unusual step: all fifth graders were moved out of elementary schools and into middle schools.
The district must trim an additional $1.2 million for next school year, and proposals include charging for bus service, canceling instructional field trips and eliminating music and art teachers in elementary schools.
So how does this stack up nationally.
From the previous school year to the current one, districts across Texas eliminated 25,286 positions through retirements, resignations and layoffs, including 10,717 teaching jobs, according to state data analyzed by Children at Risk, a nonprofit advocacy group in Houston. Texas public schools spend $8,908 per student, a decrease of $538 from the previous year and below the national average of $11,463, according to the National Education Association. California spent $9,710 and New York $15,592.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
How does the right respond to all of this. Well Paul Krugman has an interesting observation:
A good article in the Times about the terrible state of Texas schools — followed by a truly awful comment thread, in which many readers rush to blame, you guessed it, teachers’ unions.
Folks, this isn’t an article about New York, where three-quarters of public-sector workers are unionized. It’s about Texas, where only one in five public workers belongs to a union. Blaming unions for the problems of Texas is like, well, blaming Jews for the problems of Japan: there aren’t enough of them to matter.
Sigh.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/...
So that's the state of America today. Our kids education is cut to the bone while the right blames unions IN RIGHT TO WORK STATE WHERE UNIONS HAVE ALMOST NO POWER. These aren't small cuts around the edges in Texas, this is instruction and with it the future of Texas's children being thrown under the bus.