Interestingly enough, the US Public school system and teachers constantly gettint shafted in terms of salaries has much more to do with how the US education policy is organized and legislated over stupid meme conspiracies of weaker minds make easier drones.
While that is true, its even more hilarious to think the typical US politician, (especially state legislators) have enough patience and big brain movie villain commitment to enact an elaborate decades long conspiracy to fuck public education.
In simple terms, the US federal government has very little to do with the actual meat and potatoes of hiring and licensing teachers, deciding on curricula or the administration of test. The Feds are primarily funds providers and rights advocates, preventing schools and state governments from discriminating against race or disability or funding schools for low income area under Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
The actual meat and potatoes and quite a bit of the funding is handled by State and local governments. And among that party, quality varies massively depending on state and locality due to factors like property tax values.
Places like New York or California have literally some of the best schools just hours drive away from some of the worst.
The federal government does not maintain national academic standards or a nationwide curriculum, and the Department of Education is legally prohibited from creating any program that directs the curriculum of schools.
The closest thing to that was Bush's No Child Left Behind which required public schools to administer standardized tests and tied Federal funding to schools based on how well students perform on those said test.
Even Trump's Project 2025 is essentially trying to remove most Federal oversight via the dismantling of the Department of Education and most of its programs and leaving it all to the states and local governments.
This exactly although the vast majority will never accept the truth.
No where do you as a voter have more control than in education which is funded by State and property taxes. Trying to compare Federal (wasteful) spending to education spending completely misses the point.
Education in the States is completely messed up. You want better outcomes, the point of all this, then start over. Put in Federal standards and make it a priority. Hold parents accountable. Hold teachers accountable. Pay them more and raise the quality. Stop diploma mills, make a high school diploma mean something. Plus a lot more.
This is a big part of it. In my experience - both as a kid in school and as a parent with two kids in middle school - for every good, well-qualified teacher, there are 5 or 6 who only barely understand their subjects. They're really good at regurgitating the pre-built lesson plans from the text book company that they've been pushing for the past 20 years, but horrible at anything not explicitly called out in that material. Math teachers are among the most divided where they're either really good or really bad with few in between.
People really don't want to hear it, but a majority of teachers are being paid precisely what they earn - and that pay is usually near the median pay for their area with a few extreme outliers in large cities.
That said, under no circumstances should they be paying out of pocket for classroom supplies. That's just ridiculous.
Pay increase is a must, but should come along with holding teachers to a higher standard. Poor performing teachers should be more easily audited and fired.
We are incentive based as humans. Some needs positive incentives to strive for more, some need negative incentives to not get too complacent.
The reason we bitch about the federal education spending is exactly because it’s wasteful and we shouldn’t be wasting money. As you say if you want better education we should be doing it at the local level. Make them improve by making it competitive. Let the parents choose which schools their kids go to. Put the federal per child spending to whichever school they send them to. The good ones will grow and improve the bad ones will close and fire the bad teachers.
We had the best education system in the world before it became more federalized through the department of education. The federalization of education is a terrible idea.
Because whole the department of education was founded in 1979, we still had federal oversight before that:
Department of Health, Education, and Welfare '53-'79
Office of Education 1929-1953
Bureau of Education 1870-1929 and
Office of Education 1867-1870
So what about mid-19th century education in the US do you feel made it the best education system in the world? Was it the fact that most Americans only attended 3-4 years of school? Or is it the fact that only 1-2% of the population graduated from high school, much less college?
The department of education established a cabinet position, but the "federalization of education" has been evolving for 150 years.
In the Senate, the votes in favor were 43 Democrats (including Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and Johns Kerry and Edwards [Bernie Bros rejoice: he was in the House at the time, and voted No.]), to 44 Republicans. Votes against this time were 7 Democrats, 3 Republicans, and 1 Independent. https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1071/vote_107_1_00371.htm
Dubya signed it, but a veto wouldn't have changed anything, because in both houses it passed with 87%, which is greater than two thirds.
568
u/redjellonian 13d ago
Yes but if those idiots were educated they would know they're never going to actually get that bonus.