Young Americans are dumbs

[MurrayBannerman]

I'm fighting the urge to spew my anti-boomer opinions out in this thread.

[MurrayBannerman]

We're becoming a more and more a nation of the have and have-nots.  There's no real path for poor people to slowly rise up the economic ladder.  A few elite, smart hard-working people will slip through, but there's no generational upward mobility (IE grandfather was a farm-worker, father worked in a factory and paid for son to get an education).  Poor people in America just live in grinding and punishing poverty with no real chance at a decent life. 

I look at the poor kids in my neighborhood in Brooklyn.  Almost none come from two parent households with cohesion and discipline.  They have parents who are totally unprepared for parenthood and have no resources to get their lives together.  Their parents are often functionally illiterate and forced to work two or three jobs just to live.
 
A third of the local high school students don't show up to school on an average day.  They don't do homework, read for fun or do anything academic.  How is a teacher going to really change that situation?  How can those kids possibly compete with kids who study for several hours a day and have doting parents who constantly work on educating their kids?

It all just goes back to the cycle of poverty.  The more we treat poor people like human trash, the worse this county will become.  A society is built at the base and we're hollowing out the foundation of our society.  That's the problem, not teacher's unions.

As someone who's grown up in a single mother home that was reliant on welfare, I feel this statement is quite harsh. Especially when I've been given more than half of my tuition costs covered by need-based, federal and state grants and much of my study abroad trip will be covered by grants and scholarships from the state and my public school.

[MurrayBannerman]

Yes, blame the parents, blame being poor, blame whatever. However, effective teachers can make a world of difference, and that is what studies show. Nothing else much matters. Being effective means being smart, knowing the material, and being charismatic, and knowing how to keep order and stare down the punks mouthing off and disrupting, while going forward with the lesson plan. You just keep talking about Sudan being until divided the largest country in Africa as you walk up to the disrupter, and get within a few inches of his eyes, and stare bullets at him.

Perhaps teachers would be more smart people if the job was more attractive. It's underpaid, you lose time fighting in unions/direction fights, with uninterested parents and school boards wanting to keep more money for themselves or to cut to cut taxes. It's not attractive at all.

Of course. Fire the incompetents, dump tenure, and reward the talented, like with 150K per year salaries in the tougher schools. And give then the disciplinary tools. I should be a teacher, you should be a teacher, my cousin should be a teacher. Yes, we should, but of course, for excellent reasons, we don't. Sad.

I'd be in favor of a pay system that disperses teacher talent, instead of coalescing it in the higher quality schools.

[MurrayBannerman]

We're becoming a more and more a nation of the have and have-nots.  There's no real path for poor people to slowly rise up the economic ladder.  A few elite, smart hard-working people will slip through, but there's no generational upward mobility (IE grandfather was a farm-worker, father worked in a factory and paid for son to get an education).  Poor people in America just live in grinding and punishing poverty with no real chance at a decent life. 

I look at the poor kids in my neighborhood in Brooklyn.  Almost none come from two parent households with cohesion and discipline.  They have parents who are totally unprepared for parenthood and have no resources to get their lives together.  Their parents are often functionally illiterate and forced to work two or three jobs just to live.
 
A third of the local high school students don't show up to school on an average day.  They don't do homework, read for fun or do anything academic.  How is a teacher going to really change that situation?  How can those kids possibly compete with kids who study for several hours a day and have doting parents who constantly work on educating their kids?

It all just goes back to the cycle of poverty.  The more we treat poor people like human trash, the worse this county will become.  A society is built at the base and we're hollowing out the foundation of our society.  That's the problem, not teacher's unions.

As someone who's grown up in a single mother home that was reliant on welfare, I feel this statement is quite harsh. Especially when I've been given more than half of my tuition costs covered by need-based, federal and state grants and much of my study abroad trip will be covered by grants and scholarships from the state and my public school.

When we're talking about general trends, it's appropriate to make generalizations. 

And yet, in my experience, these generalizations lack truth.

[MurrayBannerman]

With the astonishing amount of money squandered by the government education industry complex, such figures are truly amazing.

Even more amazing data is the massive amounts of windfall profits reaped by those teachers despite stagnant student enrollment. They are winning the treasury.

What is your solution krazen?

Win the treasury back.

How?

That's the easiest question of all. Put the government education industry complex on a diet

Food metaphors for politics are both stupid and useless.

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More useful purposes like what?

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You're right, we do need more like Sherrod Brown and Liz Warren in high office in this country! I'm glad we see eye-to-eye on this.

Speaking strictly of universities, firing people like the "diversity coordinator" and cutting a president's salary from the millions or high hundreds of thousands would do a lot of good. Also taxing endowments by tying them to the rate of tuition.