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38, irish-american
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shel
@shel

School districts in America being locally funded instead of funded in proportion by population size/need through a central pot creates soooo many systemic issues and ripples effects that I feel like most people don't really see firsthand because most people don't move between drastically different communities over the course of their life working with the right populations in the right fields to really just see how starkly different education is for different people in different school districts and the effects that has on their lives.

Like, I'm often seeing online people saying shit like "USAmericas have no excuse for not self-educating on imperialism anyone with an internet connection and a small amount of curiosity can just look it up. They must have slept through history class if they don't even know what wars we've been in." People who say this, I think, don't realize that the education they've received is probably vastly superior to people who weren't as fortunate in the school district birth lottery. Without adequate funding, it doesn't matter how passionate and dedicated and smart your teachers are, it's simply not possible for students to receive a good education when the teacher:student ratio is fucked, there's no funding for books or school librarians, and all the kids are hungry as shit cramped into tiny uncomfortable buildings without proper heating and cooling. When your school is more like a prison than a university you're lucky if you can get basic literacy out of it. Not to mention all the kids with extra needs that can't get met and the ramifications of systemic poverty on mental health and ability to focus or even have time to do stuff like reading assignments.

The vast majority of Americans being ignorant of the history of US imperialism is not due to a lack of curiosity when a lot of those people can't fucking read at an adult level and have no research or critical thinking skills. They didn't need to sleep through history class if they couldn't even hear the teacher over their classmates shouting at each other. Information literacy in this country is very very low and the legacy of "no child left behind" means the worst performing schools just get worse.

It's easy to undervalue education when you're educated. Without the education you have, the world appears incredibly small. Without education, you don't even know how to formulate the right questions to get answers, let alone how to do dependable research. If you don't even know the world imperialism how are you going to be curious about it.

Every day at work I am dealing with fully grown adults who act like preschoolers and seem to struggle to understand the most simple concepts and sure some of them probably got lead poisoned growing up or have some intellectual disabilities but for most of them it's the illiteracy and lack of education because schools in Philly have been fucking struggling for so long. Things like logic and reasoning actually do need to be taught at some point, even if it's not Formal Logic. You need to teach people lots of different ways of thinking, how to analyze problems and formulate solutions.

The way our schools are structured needs serious reform. They're far too restrictive and punitive and prison like and make children miserable. But also more than anything else we need to fix this issue where wealthy school districts just are able to give a better education to the kids living in them and kids in low income school districts barely get an education at all. You can't blame the average person for a lack of curiosity if their only exposure to US military history of Call of Duty and nobody ever taught them about distinguishing fiction or propaganda from reality.


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in reply to @shel's post:

i've been thinking a lot lately about how important public schools are as a site of political struggle. republicans have had them on their hitlist right alongside roe v wade for decades, and the best our nominal leftwing national party has been able to muster against them is ridicule. there's a lot to be learned from the republicans in that they picked an extraordinarily unpopular position and pushed it loudly and endlessly regardless of reception, to such an extent that they've normalized ideas that should be relics of nazi fucking germany. i was taught trickle down economics in high school, that communism was a failed totalitarian ideology, that the civil war was about states rights, that racism ended with the voting rights act. it took me a decade of trying to unlearn this shit to even being to unlearn it. for every bit of obvious propaganda there's untold quantities of shit that just goes unchecked and unquestioned directly into your brain as simple fact. this shit's gotta change and there's just no excuse for appeals to political feasibility. to be a leftist of any meaningful purpose is to stand for an audacious vision of the future that we must demand in the face of many who will say it's unrealistic.

I don't think this can remotely be cast as a Republican position, the whole Michelle Rhee school voucher movement was a huge cause celebre among NPR liberals, and remains so popular they're not even doing the revisionist thing like where they all totally opposed all the war on terror shit it is nonetheless imperative we expand indefinitely. Funding through local property taxes is basically beyond question politically until you get to fringers on FBI watchlists

Paul Vallas as a part of the Chicago Machine really fucked up a lot of school systems across the country(and Haiti!). He set up New Orleans school districts with a voucher/charter system after Katrina, fired all the teachers, dissolved their union, and completely wrecked our local school systems to a point that it still hasn't recovered. And he almost became Chicago's mayor earlier this year. The problem is that school system reform is mainstream thought, but there is no alternative that sounds "reasonable." Most times its some sort of new tax scheme involving some sort of gambling that only really replaces property taxes instead of supplementing it, bringing this problem back to the beginning. And when districts do pool money, like they tried to do in Baton Rouge, the rich white neighborhoods named after Confederate Generals and Victories attempt a succession because they don't want to share their money with poor, mostly black and mixed race kids in Cancer Alley.

The soviets had it right here. All school funding should be collected and distributed at the federal level according to population size with a process for requesting additional funding for some sort of special circumstance like a community having a disproportionate number of students with higher needs or capital project grants. Linguistic diversity or taking in refugee population should also be accounted for.

Every single community deserves a fully funded school and every student deserves an education in a language they speak, ideally their most comfortable language. The soviets had a system where if you had at least 2 students that spoke a minority language they’d higher a teacher that spoke that language.

You mention "school district lottery" as a metaphor for like where one grows up, but fun fact where I grew up the good schools were literally a lottery and my dad talked often about how unbelievably relieved he felt while in the room when they were reading out winners and his number was on there meaning I could enter into to a well resourced school system instead of the "unfunded industrial park school district" we lived near lol. bleak.

It's easy to undervalue education when you're educated. Without the education you have, the world appears incredibly small. Without education, you don't even know how to formulate the right questions to get answers, let alone how to do dependable research. If you don't even know the world imperialism how are you going to be curious about it.

You don't know what you don't know. They're called "blind spots" for a reason. Expecting people to know things they've never come across, or never learned about is just... bleh. Those types of people are exhausting.