Forget about everybody's best interests, I'll do what I want...

[D.o.S.]

I think public schools should only be allowed to spend a tiny portion of their funds on sports.
$20 says that if you did that, you'd see a notable positive change in public schools.

Why?

[jrfox92]

I think public schools should only be allowed to spend a tiny portion of their funds on sports.
$20 says that if you did that, you'd see a notable positive change in public schools.

Why?

My experience: schools (at least, in Texas) spent a lot of money on sports.
They could have 15 year old text books but the sports teams would still have brand new equipment and they'd be planning on building a multi-million dollar sports stadium for the teams.

[D.o.S.]

I'm going to ignore the easy joke about how if they had new textbooks they'd have to tear out all the pages about evolution (again) and no one has the time for that.

And instead I am going to ask you if you think schools should be allowed to spend money on what the communities see fit to be the most important aspects of their shared existence.

[odontophobia]

I'm going to ignore the easy joke about how if they had new textbooks they'd have to tear out all the pages about evolution (again) and no one has the time for that.

And instead I am going to ask you if you think schools should be allowed to spend money on what the communities see fit to be the most important aspects of their shared existence.

No need to make the joke, that's the DeVos Difference, man.

[Chankgeez]

I should take this opportunity to point out that Mexican grizzlies are functionally extinct (and have been for the past 50 years).

[comesect2.0]

idk if its just texas in your blood jr but you look familiar....anyway was brought up thankfully in a private school environment and when 8th grade hit, moved to public schools because the family money was pissed off...and from that I learned public schools=learn to deal with real life every day ass holes and social clicks...private=ya get what you pay for...an education. I see more church/religious centers with glorious buildings furnished with high end stuff, those fuckholes should contribute to having the public school not look like a rat hole...in fact from what Ive seen, rats take better care of their homes then the district teaching well rounded curriculum and contributing to helping students have a idea of what the future can be for them.....last day of being in those places was hilarious in retrospect ...."what are you going to do with your life lee?" - "I dont know" .... there was more times we watched a movie on a book in class then discuss the book outright...in which id roam the halls.

[Invisible Man]

Shit is real. Just moved from Flint (predictably terrible schools) to Dexter, which is an affluent, almost entirely white hamlet a few miles west of Ann Arbor. Thought long and hard about what it meant almost entirely in terms of personal politics and public schools...looked at sending the babies to the remarkably diverse but failing schools my wife and I went to. Read studies indicating that the educational level of parents is a more accurate and consistent indicator of academic success than school rankings...still moved to the rich white town.

My experience is that academic success and perception of academic success are very different. For reasons still not clear, my parents pulled my brother and I from a top-10 school in the state to a lower third-school. Not hard to understand how friends from the old area got into better schools, have easier career paths, &c.

Long and obvious story short: we thought (and still think) being a parent is about sublimating your personal politics and giving kids every opportunity. It's one reason why we tend to get more conservative as we age (in the classical sense if not the contemporary one).

So now we just have periodic crises of conscience.

--a personal narrative of political ambiguity

[D.o.S.]

Yeah I think that the networking aspect of privatized schooling is often overlooked because people want to pretend that where you wind up in the general "success" hierarchy still has to do with merit, rather than adequate competency and being able to shake the correct hands.

[jrfox92]

I'm going to ignore the easy joke about how if they had new textbooks they'd have to tear out all the pages about evolution (again) and no one has the time for that.

My last science teacher (who was my favourite) was/is a devout Christian and a strong believer in/proponent of evolution.

And instead I am going to ask you if you think schools should be allowed to spend money on what the communities see fit to be the most important aspects of their shared existence.

Yeah, I suppose.
But shouldn't that mean a more democratic approach to school spending, too?
Voting on every little thing, right?

[comesect2.0]

so your saying the old "its not what you know, its who ya know" opening up a business is bout the same...location location location.

[D.o.S.]

I'm going to ignore the easy joke about how if they had new textbooks they'd have to tear out all the pages about evolution (again) and no one has the time for that.

My last science teacher (who was my favourite) was/is a devout Christian and a strong believer in/proponent of evolution.

well you don't have to believe in evolution. That's the whole point: it doesn't give a shit what you think about it.

And instead I am going to ask you if you think schools should be allowed to spend money on what the communities see fit to be the most important aspects of their shared existence.

Yeah, I suppose.
But shouldn't that mean a more democratic approach to school spending, too?
Voting on every little thing, right?

The school board approves the budget, the people in the community vote for the school board, right? Representational democracy at it's finest. At least, I presume this is how it works in Texas, which may not be the case.

Also textbooks (generally) contain the same information year after year -- no one is going to fact check fucking Pythagoras and come up with a new theorem for teaching kids how to solve for the longest side of a triangle for whatever, much to the chagrin of the folks who get paid to write the textbooks.

[D.o.S.]

My point is that most people don't care about the quality of an education and (particularly in Texas, the high school football capital of the planet) most of them would be more than happy to divert money away from, say, art supplies and towards a bigger and better sports stadium. Thinking is hard. Rooting for laundry is easy. This is why we are where we are, for the most part.

[comesect2.0]

the gift of wonder and stillness has been in mad hurt since now kids can look up anything in half a millisecond on google from their phones, google thinks for us now. ahah

[D.o.S.]

I mean another way to look at it is that the internet has allowed for an unprecedented democratization of information and we're seeing all the good and bad things that that entails, right?

What I don't like about DeVos is that her platform not-even-subtly harkens back to the era of human history where your education determined your expertise in a way that brings to mind masses conducted in Latin, slaves not being taught how to read or write, and things like that. There's a strain of people that believe qualifications are what make for experts, rather than the ability to draw new connections from preexisting contexts, and that way of thinking is very much in favor of the DeVossian "natural order", if you follow me.

I am, of course, using her as necessary shorthand here.

[comesect2.0]

All I know is soon as I post somthin about google my Internet become inactive and I had to go unplug re plug shit....fuckin hologram...anyways yep d.o.s. bad side I saw at the post office other day was a mother asking boy to go get a pen 5 feet away for her and he would not look up from his watch phone thing until she asked me to hold her place so she could get it.