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7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I went to public schools. They were excellent.

And it's no secret that the GOP has been trying to destroy public education for the last 50 years, so not sure what point the cartoonist is trying to make.

10 May, 2017 06:25  

delagar said...

My kid is in our local public school, and yes, it is excellent.

Anonymous is right. The big lie that Conservatives have been pushing for the past 40 or 50 years is that public education is failing.

It is Conservatives who are responsible for the current public contempt for teachers and indeed all educators -- they have repeated their lie, over and over, that teachers are incompetent, that they are ignorant, that they do nothing but indoctrinate students, that they are lazy, and their children have been listening, for fifty years.

Now we have entire generations of Americans who believe this lie.

What we should be asking ourselves is *why* Conservatives want to destroy public education. What will they gain by putting education out of the reach of most people?

And that's what will happen. Without public education, most working American will not be able to afford to educate their children. These "vouchers" Conservatives squeal about will end up being like Pell grants -- they will cover only a fraction of the cost of education a child. Where will someone who works minimum wage get the rest of the cost?

Conservatives want an America where the children of the 1% get a quality education, and the rest of us either go to some corporate school (like those being set up right now by Wal-Mart) that trains you to work in a corporation, or no education at all.

10 May, 2017 08:12  

ferschitz said...

My argument is that the Democrats aren't really our friends in regard to public education, either. They just behave with more subtlety. Arne Duncan was no real friend to the public education system.

What our 1% Overlords want, as well as their poodles in the legislative and executive and judicial branches, is to pillage and plunder the public school system for their financial gain, aka the Charter School system. While some Charter schools are undoubtedly good and may possibly serve a reasonable purpose, many aren't that great, the teachers aren't unionized and get paid less with crummy benefits, but the fat cats at the top rake in the taxpayer dough for themselves. What else is new? We've all seen this movie before.

There are very good public school systems. I have friends and relatives who work in some great public schools. But unfortunately a lot of public schools, especially in the poorer areas, have been left to languish and/or are truly not run very well. So, they're ripe for pivatizing.

There's all these stats about how "great" Charter schools are and how much better their students do. That's all very well until you look more closely and realize that many charter schools only skim off the cream at the top of student body and force the low-performing students, and those with special needs, back into the public school system. Then everyone points at the public school and whines that they're not producing better, smarter students. Yeah, right. Well that's often by design.

I'll stop now. There are some big problems with our K - 12 public school system, and we rank much lower than we used to. But that's mainly by design. And as delagar points out, the 1% do prefer to have some students not be well educated, except in order to be good dumb workers in crappy jobs.

10 May, 2017 10:34  

CharlieE said...

They don't want to "upend" it; they want to privatize it.

I'm not sure why; Republicans hate education and refer to educated people as "elites."

Former education spokesman George W. Bush put it best:


"Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?" – Florence, South Carolina; January 11, 2000
"You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test."
"As yesterday's positive report card shows, childrens do learn when standards are high and results are measured."

10 May, 2017 10:50  

Thx 4 Fish said...

If charter schools were truly that much better they would have grown much more rapidly by now. But they haven't taken over and there's a reason for that. People want public schools. Public schools can offer so much more to their students.

One of my kids really benefited from all of the special ed services available in the public schools in elementary school. But when he got to high school he switched to a charter school just because the classes were smaller and the public high school was just too big. I believe there is a place for both types of schools. But what Republicans want to do is give the advantage to the charter schools to turn yet one more of our public sectors into a money making machine for the few and well-connected.

10 May, 2017 13:25  

Anonymous said...

I went to a private school, where the priests molested us and the nuns beat us within an inch of our lives.

Thank god for public schools so we could escape that evil madness. Too bad about all the suicides, but that's private schools.

14 May, 2017 01:32  

Anonymous said...

Like some of you I attend GREAT public schools from K-12. My family was not wealthy but the town I lived in in northern NJ was. If it ever came to a decision of the library or the football team, the football would have been gone. It never came to that because the town could do both, but I do remember being question by a friend's father who was on the town council, and the big question that year was: How do we improve the town's and school's libraries? Cost was never an issue; to hell with that. Quality was.

All because the town had wealthy citizens who damn well knew where their wealth came from. Many went on to the private universities, but it was that public school system 100% supported by those wealthy people that laid the foundation for them to gain entrance.

17 May, 2017 17:48  

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