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Posted on 07/10/2012 5:14:22 PM PDT by MinorityRepublican
President Obama said last month that America can educate its way to prosperity if Congress sends money to states to prevent public school layoffs and "rehire even more teachers." Mitt Romney was having none of it, invoking "the message of Wisconsin" and arguing that the solution to our economic woes is to cut the size of government and shift resources to the private sector. Mr. Romney later stated that he wasn't calling for a reduction in the teacher force—but perhaps there would be some wisdom in doing just that.
Since 1970, the public school workforce has roughly doubled—to 6.4 million from 3.3 million—and two-thirds of those new hires are teachers or teachers' aides. Over the same period, enrollment rose by a tepid 8.5%. Employment has thus grown 11 times faster than enrollment. If we returned to the student-to-staff ratio of 1970, American taxpayers would save about $210 billion annually in personnel costs.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Unfortunately, many of the teachers are morons, who have taken endless, countless courses in such idiotic arcana as “Lesson Planning” and other useless tommyrot, while, at the same time having little knowledge of their subject.
Moreover, far too many are dedicated and doctrinaire Leftists, more interested in indoctrinating the young in a peculiar variety of Marxism which asserts in an utterly tiresome manner that, “Marxism could work if only it were done right.”
As all such idiots, they like to pretend that the failures of the USSR, Red China, Vietnam, Cuba, Cambodia, and on and on, never happened or were somehow anomalous.
That would be bad enough; however they also seek to instill in the young their warped values and childish view of history.
America needs far fewer such characters, not more of them.
America has too many people who can’t teach pretending to be teachers.
Since 1970, the public school workforce has roughly doubled—to 6.4 million from 3.3 million—and two-thirds of those new hires are teachers or teachers' aides.
I wonder how many of those teachers are actually in the classroom. How many teachers aides did they have in 1970? Biggest thing that needs to be done for almost all public school systems is review how many administrators they have and get rid of the excess number, it will make balancing the budget much easier.
Employment has thus grown 11 times faster than enrollment. If we returned to the student-to-staff ratio of 1970, American taxpayers would save about $210 billion annually in personnel costs.We'd also have better public education if we replaced them with Speak-and-Spells.
Add in all the social workers, speech therapists, psychologists, special needs teachers, etc. and it’s not hard to figure out why it averages $12,000 per student.
Privatize education—all of it.
They weren't paid all that well either. Most of them could be seen working various odd jobs in the summer or other times school was not in session. One of our best music teachers found out what the district was paying sending musical instruments off to Minneapolis for repairs. He offered to do them in his basement at a fraction of the price.
He was so good that, next thing you knew, neighboring school districts started sending their instruments to him as well. He ended up retiring from teaching and going into the business full time. His timing couldn't have been better. For it was about that time the NEA got salaries pushed up along with a lot of bs restrictions on hiring and on allowing teachers to do outside work. They wanted them beholden to only the union.
In our small town elementary school, there are more school personnel who are not teachers than actual classroom teachers.
The problem in my humble opinion is we have too few teachers and far too many union members....
Teachiing at one time was considered a “calling” as in your life had a higher purpose ....
Now most teachers are basically union tools....
Myself, I think the best thing that could be done for American education is to utterly abolish all these degrees in “education,” and make sure that a teacher teaching English, for example, knows the use of English - vocabulary, syntax, and grammar.
But, yes, the proliferation of bureaucrats - i.e., characters who know absolutely nothing about anything except how to trip up others for not observing an encyclopedia of rules - is a horrendous problem not only in education, but throughout society.
They are not educated to “educate”- they are educated to “transform”. Scan a book list at a College near you in education department - particularly at the Graduate level, and look for Friere & Dewey. The goal of “transformative education” is not education - but social change, the same as the messiah in th White House.
And if you look at the values of our young ones passed to them by government education - it is working, especially as illustrated by the youth vote in 2008.
Leaving no teacher behind.
It’s not the teachers, it’s the administrators....you could get rid of 90% of them and not miss a beat.
Freep-mail me to get on or off my pro-life and Catholic List:
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When I entered first grade, there was no Head Start, and there were at least 40 kids in that class; but we were reading simple stories by the end of the year. Two reasons why: (1) the kids were under control and ready to earn (I got my mouth taped shut once for talking out of turn and eventually completed graduate school despite that act of “child abuse”; and (2)phonics were used to teach reading
There, that's more like it!
I don’t know about teachers, but definitely too many administrators. There are something three administrators for every teacher in educational districts.
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