Wasteful government spending on education

Obama is going to give away $150 billion to the educational industrial complex.

It’s like an alcoholic at the end of the night when the bars close, and the solution is to open the bar for another hour.

A better use for the money is to just send everyone in the country a check for $500.

Comments

[Ivy Leaguer]

Ahh deluded egalitarianism is alive!

[SFG]

Bush tried that already, remember?

The problem here is that the feminists realized a modern-day WPA would mostly give jobs to men, so he has to give the teachers extra jobs too.

However it doesn't really matter who you give money to as long as they spend it....

Oh and just up and nationalize the banks already and force them to start lending again.

[ZigZag Man]

Why not send everyone a million dollars?

[Otto]

Along with that, why don't they give us the bailout money as well? Won't that help jumpstart the economy through spending? I for one could use the money for my last year of college tuition.

[miles]

Its a "job-maker" for whiterpeople with otherwise useless degrees.

Many of the whiterpeople got those degrees because they couldn't do complex math or science. In a way, its a giant welfare grant for people just smart enough to pass lit, sociology, history, pop-psychology, and education courses for four years and get a degree in political-correctness-whiterpeople-thought. Since we crank out a bunch of these..................they need jobs as "educators" and other education-associated jobs (school psychologists, second assistant vice principals, school events co-ordinators, diversity officers, resourse-this-resourse-that in every little rinky-dink college and high school that they can agitate to accept them all over America.

Dont forget about the ever shrinking class-size scam also. "If only classes had just 15 students instead of 30..................." This just doubles the amount of teachers necessary and is another jobs program. I had some chemistry classes in college that had over 100 students therein, sat in the back and did just fine.

How much does it REALLY take to educate in terms of infrastructure? Some books, yes. A nice calculator for trig perhaps, a DVD player might be helpful for some video presentations as related to history or to accompany pieces of literature, a good paddle to keep the little bohemians in line, some chalkboards, some cinderblock school buildings, about one teacher for every thirty kids there, and a whoop-ass principal who doesn't take any shit with a vice-principal to "be there" when he is sick or out. Thats really about all you'd need if the kids are from solid homes and are motivated (My dad's motivation was this: You bring home a report card with more than 1 C on it, and you are not allowed to go out and play after school when you get home, but will sit in that bedroom and study all night with no TV.............you challenge me physically on this and I will beat you within a inch of your life (he did that a couple of times too). Guess what? I calibrated my study habits to make sure I made straight B's.

[zzz]

“This is going to avert literally hundreds of thousands of teacher layoffs,”

About time they feel the pain of private sector workers. Next step: Outsourcing teaching to a poor country w/ a smart population willing to work for peanuts; India would be a great candidate. And don't forget about replacing teachers w/ people who are willing to work for less money.

A friend of mine, who is a teacher, was complaining the other day about her "horribly low pay" compared to some of her fellow grads who entered finance, IT and engineering and how she has to still live the lifestyle of a lowly college student; mainly renting a house w/ other people.

(Every college graduate hears this sob story at least once a week.)

I alleviated her complaints by informing her that her job cannot be outsourced to India or China. Just don't take your clothes off for young Billy and you'll have lifetime employment with GUARANTEED RAISES as a result of a union contract.

It shut her up.

[Ned]

An even better use for the money is to cut taxes by $150 billion. That would put it into the hands of the most productive people in the country.

[Peter]

"How much does it REALLY take to educate in terms of infrastructure? Some books, yes. A nice calculator for trig perhaps, a DVD player might be helpful for some video presentations as related to history or to accompany pieces of literature, a good paddle to keep the little bohemians in line"

Back in my elementary school days, the principal ensured good discipline by means of The Strap. It was a thick leather strip about a foot long and an inch in width. Applied to outstreched palms The Strap created an intense pain that even the biggest toughest eighth-grade boys could barely withstand. I fell victim to The Strap on only a few occasions - some boys* met its wrath weekly or even more often - but I feared it from the deepest part of my being. It is difficult to imagine any form of academic discipline with deterrence value remotely approaching that of The Strap.

Alas, even back in those dark ages The Strap was quite controversial, and it went out to pasture a year or two after I graduated from elementary school. And I'm reasonably sure that discipline suffered.

* = only boys ever encountered The Strap, a discriminatory policy that may have accelerated its retirement

[gig]

"In a way, its a giant welfare grant for people just smart enough to pass lit, sociology, history, pop-psychology, and education courses for four years and get a degree in political-correctness-whiterpeople-thought"

there is both stupidity and a sheer amount of pure laziness.

Posted by: miles | January 28, 2009 at 11:32 AM

Amen to that rant, miles. Especially the part about ass beatings. Turned me around very quickly. And little military service or serious physical labor would help out as well.

And speaking of class size, get a look at this:

http://www.discriminations.us/2009/01/improving_the_education_of_all.html

You can't make this shit up...

[Moshe]

@ miles | January 28, 2009 at 11:32 AM

A paddle to keep the little bohemians in line! A father who will beat you within a inch of your life! (Sure sign of a "solid home.") You certainly have it all figured out. Come on friend, some "cinder block" school buildings?

Is this the pop-psychology of a chemistry student?

And as St. Augustine said, all true education begins with physical punishment.

[Alex]

It seems like a better use of 150 billion dollars would be to provide scholarships for kids who get high scores on the SATs.

By my calculations, for only 7.6 billion dollars, you could give every kid who scores above a 2100 on the SAT a 4 year 40,000 USD scholarship. And if you took financial need into consideration, you could probably stretch the money a lot further.

---

Another idea would be paying students for getting high scores on AP tests. If you gave every kid in the country $1000 for getting a 5 on the AP calculus test, it would cost 44 million USD.

5 on the AP Physics test? 6.8 million USD. 5 on the AP Statistics test? 11 million USD.

Any of these programs would be pocket change to the current budget, but they'd be a huge boon to America's high school education.

[Jim Beam]

"A paddle to keep the little bohemians in line! A father who will beat you within a inch of your life! (Sure sign of a "solid home.")

You might be a prole if...

Posted by: Alex | January 28, 2009 at 01:35 PM

Sorry, never happen...Not enough blacks or hispanics would get the money. A good idea though. In a sane society that is...

[Moshe]

@Posted by: Jim Beam | January 28, 2009 at 01:48 PM

Eh, don't be a shlub. I welcome prole humor.

[tommy]

As I stated on Steve's blog a week or two ago:

"My youngest brother's English teacher is demonstrating her commitment to her profession by calling in sick so that she can watch the inauguration on television. I'm also informed they will be broadcasting the inauguration over the speakers of the school. I can guarantee they didn't do that during Bush's inauguration.

Given my little brother's daily encounters with public school teachers who talk on their cell phones and browse the internet handling their personal business during class time, nothing should surprise me from the lazy, bitchy, ignorant, liberal do-nothings who pretend to educate kids these days. Still I find the blatant political propaganda in the public schools these days rather astonishing. My brother has no trouble naming teachers who openly and routinely make their contempt for Bush known to their students.

Even the mediocre, gently liberal teachers I recall in junior high and high school sound like Sullenbergers of education compared to the latest batch of scoundrels fresh from the teachers' colleges."

I'm sick of hearing teachers extolled as heroes in our society. I encounter many teachers who take the job precisely because of the numerous holidays and administrative days they get off-- along with a yearly summer vacation. Even with all this time they're given, my brother reports many of his teachers regularly take long vacations during the school year. Teachers like to counter that they use the summer vacation to improve their own education. I guess they believe getting time off to earn better pay is some sort of sacrifice on their part. Certainly, they aren't going back to school because the crap they teach at the masters level makes them substantially better at teaching than those with a bachelors degree.

[Ivy Leaguer]

@ Alex:

Those two ideas are brilliant. How about spending our money supporting the academic success of the upper part of the bell curve? What a novel concept!

Instead, we get programs like a recent one profiled on CNN (in, not surprisingly, an excessively positive light). They showcased an elite, liberally deluded prof who wants to pay poor people (READ: blacks) so that they'll perform better in school. How long will it take people to realize the reality of biodiversity? That no amount of money will raise any racial/ethnic group.

[Alex]

Ivy Leaguer wrote:

Those two ideas are brilliant. How about spending our money supporting the academic success of the upper part of the bell curve? What a novel concept!

--

Indeed. A lot of money is already spent on the smartest students (just look at Harvard's endowment). The big problem is that prestige among colleges is a negative sum game, which causes the price of colleges to go up and up.

What we need to do is allocate resources to the education and placement of intelligent people by some mechanism OTHER than prestige. There would be numerous benefits of that. People would be burdened with less student debts, no one would graduate from lower tier colleges and suddenly find out that their job opportunities do not match their expectations, and finally the birth rate of educated people would go up as they'd graduate from school in fewer years.

Ivy Leaguer wrote:

Instead, we get programs like a recent one profiled on CNN (in, not surprisingly, an excessively positive light). They showcased an elite, liberally deluded prof who wants to pay poor people (READ: blacks) so that they'll perform better in school. How long will it take people to realize the reality of biodiversity? That no amount of money will raise any racial/ethnic group.

--

I don't disagree with that policy. Just because we can't (based on our current knowledge) bring poor people to equity with the upper middle class, doesn't mean that we shouldn't use our resources to try to improve their education.

To clarify, we might create a policy where students in top magnet schools get paid for how many 5's they get on AP Tests, and students at average public schools get paid for passing (getting a 3 or higher).

[.............]

ok really? do you now understand that we are one of the dumbest countries in America? we need the money for schools, so that we can achieve more and therefor, we would gain more money in the end. also if we had more money for the educational system, maybe we wouldn't have as many people like you who just want the money for themselves!

[.............]

ok really? do you now understand that we are one of the dumbest countries in America? we need the money for schools, so that we can achieve more and therefor, we would gain more money in the end. also if we had more money for the educational system, maybe we wouldn't have as many people like you who just want the money for themselves!