03.29.09
California’s Mismanagement Scaring Even Cheerleaders
Wow! Even a cheerleader like Robert Scoble is starting to doubt that California is the promised land. This is big news.
But that’s just my stories. For California as a whole I’m sensing that the whole state is primed for a major brain drain.
Why? Our state is bankrupt. What was the response? Lay off a bunch of teachers. Our education system is already in the toilet, but this will make it worse. Other states, like Texas, that aren’t bankrupt and aren’t laying off teachers, are looking more and more attractive to parents. It’s that, or spend 10s of thousands on private schools.
There’s a general feeling that crime is getting worse. That’s part a PR problem due to four Oakland police officers getting killed last week, but how will we solve those problems if we don’t have any money to hire more cops, build more prisons, etc, etc? Callers to KGO radio yesterday made it sound like the crime problem is getting worse. Rubbed into the wound is the fact that as a state we’ve decided to stop spending money on education and I predict we’ll see the problem get even worse as uneducated kids hit the job market and find no one is willing to hire them. The crime rate is about to head up big time because of this.
The truth is pretty simple. The Bay Area does not equal California. Given that most of the state’s resident live in the southern part of the state, I would argue that for most Californians, the Bay Area’s particular characteristics are unlike the state they know. We’re not suddenly aware that crime is here. We’ve known this for many years and aren’t freaking out because of the killing of 4 Oakland police officers. Since our state has gone to great lengths to prevent people from protecting themselves, we cringe whenever we hear of violence against our protectors (the police), but this isn’t anything we haven’t seen before.
Our education is in the toilet, but it isn’t because of lack of money. With a recent high school graduate in the house, I can tell you that the school system was the obstacle that almost prevented MJ and most of his friends from learning and growing into thinking adults. Why? Because the schools are political and environmental indoctrination machines, with Fascist-like dictatorial powers used in administering prison-like campuses. A well-educated person questions the answers and doctrine given by those in authority, but this very thing brings a young person into conflict with power-tripping teachers, principals, and counselors.
Let us talk about the money for a minute. A local superintendent is about to retire from a pay of $240,600 per year. He may be a very good school administrator (or not so good), but his work is certainly not worth $200k+ a year. One of the big problems with our schools is that local campuses and the districts themselves are too large. I would assume that a superintendent who makes over $200k per year will have a couple of $150k deputies, who would each have two to four $100 – $120k people reporting to them. Below that would be several school principals, deputy principals, and finally the actual teachers who do the work of education. Seeing that teachers universally complain that there aren’t enough resources at the classroom level, the thing we must do is get rid of the highly-paid administrators (smaller districts helps immensely by making it obvious to all that these guys are superfluous).
Remember that $1 out of every $2 of the state budget is spent for the schools. The schools’ voracious appetite for money is unquenchable, so much that school spending is slowly strangling highways, mass transit, and other essentials of such a populous state’s budget. We keep hearing that this is inadequate, that California must dramatically increase its school funding, even if this results in sharp increases in taxation for our working families.
California’s school situation is dire simply because we’ve centralized funding and control in Sacramento. Just as with the nation’s financial system, our problem is the dominance and control by large, out-of-area institutions. There are thousands of locally-owned banks, savings & loans, and credit unions that are not in need of bailouts. But the big nationwide institutions were mismanaged and our whole nation is suffering as a result. It is the same with schools.
Funds from outside the local community, coupled with a profound lack of parental control of the whole educational process, mean that the schools do not have to adapt or be responsive to the concerns of the parents who know their children best. For example, MJ used to spend 4 hours or more each night on homework, and frequently wasn’t finished even after that. After spending 6 to 7 hours at school, pouring on the homework that way is–in my opinion–unconscionable.
One of my nephews used to do his full week’s homework schedule in half an hour on Monday. When his mother met with the teachers to request harder work, they informed her that they were not allowed to deviate from their predefined grade-specific content. This child’s brother is more like MJ, and used to spend his entire after-school time doing homework. Do you see the point? Each child is different, and has different capacities for school-based learning. State-issued standards about homework and classroom content fail to take into account that some students in a typical thirty-student classroom are probably a year or more advanced over some others.
What is the solution? We need to make sure that school districts are smaller, and that parents have more control over them than do professional educrats. In fact, we need to make legal changes to our educational system so that are unresponsive to parent and students’ needs are denied permission to operate. Secondly, we need to change the way we fund schools, so that the majority of their funds come from the local community. This will probably necessitate changes to Proposition 13’s controls on property taxes. And thirdly, we need to stop trying to recapture what schools did in 1940 and 1950. The nation, the economy, and the world around us are quite different now than they were back then. We must also stop indoctrinating children. If it is true, let them figure it out because they are intelligent thinkers. I’m talking to you, anthropogenic global warming (AGW), also known as “climate change”.
Back then, we knew that many graduates would go into factory jobs where a fixed set of basic skills served as the entry requirements for a life-long career. For this reason, schools tried to give each student the same training, the same content, as any other student. Today, there are few factory jobs awaiting graduates. Instead, they are faced with retail (many graduates will work for the large discount chain we know as “Big Blue”), foodservice (the “Golden Arches” is the first employer for a huge number of people), and other low-wage service jobs. The best futures are available to those who go out and start their own enterprises and do something differently from the way everyone else does. However, this requires that schools stop being “education factories” and reform themselves around “boutique training programs” tailored to the needs and plans of each individual student.
To be sure, This is going to be time-consuming, expensive, and contentious. We can do some things to reduce the costs, however. Knowing what we know, why do students have to sit in classrooms every day, when much of their learning could be just as effective in an online format? I got my Master’s Degree online, so I know that it takes personal investment in one’s own success. But that is exactly what is needed for those who go on to start and run their own enterprises. Best of all, this kind of training is very amenable to personal research.
And, yes, I am among those looking into Texas and other states. California’s decision to raise taxes during a recession is going to hurt state residents more. This includes those who are already struggling, those who have no healthcare insurance, and college students.
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