Dakine, apologies for not being more explicit here. I mean for the level of education we were getting, here in Switzerland you have to go to a private school. They are usually expensive and not tax-deductible here. Thus my remark. I do not have enough data about the US on this subject.

I would like to offer my vote for this Ticker to be included in Ticker Classic's (i dont know if there is a special place on the forum to do so or if i can cast my vote on this thread...?).

I havent done enough due dilligence to weigh in on the illegal alien issues in the last paragraph (except to wonder if they were purposely smuggled in by the major corporations to serve as cheap labor to prop up earnings and benefit shareholders) however i stand behind the need to VASTLY improve our schools and education system as a whole.

Dirtysouth,

It seems like we think that investing in education is like something you can compare with "Water control Maintenance".

The socialist/communist concept is: "Education and production together". As you can see education is considered as a integral part of production - not as tax burden (which is then compared with "water control maintenance", and other crap).

Lets take example of our military. We kick ass. Why? We spend ~45% of entire world wide military expenditure. On the military in general, the USA spends more than the rest of the G7 countries combined. We increased our spending on military by 50% from 1996 to 2004. Of course, it is politically incorrect to say that we just waste our dollars on military or Iraq.

So if we want to be smartest in the world, then we should spend ~45% of entrire world wide education expenditure. But we don't.

Of course, there is also "dumming down"/"grade inflation" experiment going on here. But this experiment is defintly not part of socialism. It is also happening in private institutions.
I don't have strong data, but my boss is constantly complaining about grade inflation in MIT, Standford, and other elite universities (GPA does not help any more to screen smart ones). He has 30+ years of experience, so I take his world.
Here is one link: http://chronicle.com/free/v47/i30/30b024....

So, in my opinion, there are two main problems:
1) We don't spend enough for public education system
2) We have rampant grade inflation and dumming down in both public and private sector

The problem is not that we don't spend enough its where we spend it. KDs point of $$/spent on a per child basis being inverse is somewhat right but I don't know where the info comes from so I cannot verify.

What I have seen is all the kids that are labeled "special", unique or whatever so the school district has to have 1:1 relationships. this pushes the total spending up by the school district but actually just moves 1 teachers salary to one student. This and the myriad of federal programs have allow administrations to become bloated continues to take $$ away from the normal students.

Now, to get kids using computers they have kids play games. They already do that at home. go back and teach the basics, and teach reasoning not memorization. Once you can think for yourself, they can figure the rest out.

This ticker is a classic IMO too.

I've been so flipping mad at my school for years it's not even funny.

The first time I visted one before my kids even went I closed a loan for a principal of a middle school, I had to sit in the office waiting for the guy for about 30 minutes.

During that time I got to watch a staff of 8 women, "not being sexist here they just all happened to be women', and during that 30 minutes I don't think more than two of them actually did anything.

They all had state of the art computers and they all just gabbed the whole time I was there.

I was so furious I almost passed out, I mentioned it to the guy against my better judgement I was so mad, usually I never ever say anything controversial to a client, it's just not done but this time I made an exception.

Basically I said that wow, you have a big staff, must be a lot of work to do.

Ok so it wasn't that confrontational but he just grunted and ignored it.

Since then I've watched them for over a decade be a money grubbing black hole of child indoctrinization.

One example of something that just infuriates me is their stupid dogs with Dad day.

Now on a special day twice a year you're invited to come have a hot dog with your kid, the reason they do this is that each dad pays a couple dollars for a meal that was donated to the school and it's a fund raising tactic which is fine execpt every year I go there I sit with my daughters and every year there is a group of kids sitting on the grass with the teacher, many crying because of course they don't have a dad to show up or who will show up.

Mother****ers.

They care more about the money than the freaking kids, they constantly time after time exhibit this sort of behavior, they use the kids to draw in parents, parade them around for musical plays and graduation from every ****ing grade just to get money.

They use peoples affection and commitment for their kids as a weapon to make money and then if you say want to go on vaction during one of their precious nonsensical half days they watch movies and eat popcorn on you're the devil as a parent.

I am so so so*****ed off at them it's not even funny.

I hope the shortfall in the budget flames all their useless asses.



P.S.

To the good teachers who have to suffer this system I apologize, to those others I call useless ****tards, eat **** and die.

When I found out that some bleeding heart lib was taking clothes left in lost and found and donating them to a cause in MEXICO!, i lost it completely. There were 100 plus "unclaimed" items a month that were top of the line, high end clothing items that were being gathered and shipped to beaners south of the border, or so I was told.

I said BULL****!, if parents want to let their kids throw away clothes, that's fine. But I will not allow it to go to ****ing leeches south of the border. Instead, I put together a program that sells items in bulk and on eBay.

So far in 2008, about $2600 in clothing and accessories have been sold. BUT, the$ stays here and goes back to the school.

It's amazing the fine stuff that gets left behind. If one of my kids come home without a personal item, they march back and get it. PERIOD! If they don't find it.... sorry "that's the price you pay".

I asked my daughter who just graduated 5th grade if they did the sharing supplies thing, she said yes and proceeded to show me things with her name on it that with tons of missing items, marker sets, crayons, colored pencil sets etc.

She said the teacher gave them all back at the end of the year to the kids whose names were on it and said if something is missing don't blame us blame your fellow students.

What kind of horse**** is this?

If my kid lost something then they lost it and I'd rightly have a talking to them about it, most likely would dock their allowance for it.

How am I supposed to respond to this kind of crap? It's not my daughters fault so who can I bill for the lost stuff?

Freaking amazing.

Everything KD said is true and most of it has been bugging me for a long time.

Quote:

black hole

Quote:

Mother****ers.

Quote:

every ****ing grade

Quote:

those others I call useless ****tards, eat **** and die

I'm so OFFENDED by the use of such INFLAMMATORY, RACIST, SEXIST, MENTALLY CHALLENGED bashing and degrading WORDS. Oh my golly jee wheelickers. I better get out the vagisil. It's a good thing I didn't see the word ****** leech**** like Steph was condemed for in a post of the self righteous or my pussy really would be sore.

****ING HYPOCRITS.

Heidiland -

First - no school anywhere is free. What you mean is it's free to the student but not to those who are taxed to pay it's expenses.

Second - people in Switzerland learn 3-4 languages because you USE all of them on a regular basis. English, French, German, and whatever (Italian?) Where across the US do we even have the ability to use a second language regularly ? Maybe wherever we have illegals from south of the border who only speak Spanish can someone sustain a language outside of a school environment. I hear this crap all the time and I ask you - if you only had the chance to speak one language outside of school, would you retain fluency ? No.

When in school I took years of Spanish, German and French. Many years later, I can recognize words and puzzle out meaning in all these languages, but hold a conversation or understand a movie in those languages ? No way.

deleted not worth bothering

Abi-normal--

When it comes to the schools donating lost-and-found items to charities, you have to cut them some slack. Our family used to be regular visitors of the lost-and-found, and it was clear that the school accumulated mountains of stuff, and that it usually remained unclaimed. Kids don't like to admit to parents that they lost expensive clothing and other items, and in affluent neighborhoods there are parents who would not demean themselves to retrieve even a $200 coat.

I once asked the office staff what they did with all the unclaimed stuff, and one of them replied jokingly, "We have a landfill out back."

Bw8472--

The large clerical staff is probably made up of wives of board of education members, or their friends and relatives. In my community, there are only two categories of people who are hired by the school district: people who have suck, and people who can be hired for the lowest possible teaching salary.

The "plum" jobs are basically welfare for the more affluent members of the community. And a nice welfare check it is.

To put it in perspective, though, I'm not seeing overstaffing at our local schools. School employees are busily engaged in something or other.

One of my gripes for many years was the school eye exams. Every year the school would do eye exams for all the students. But did they ever notify the parents if there was a problem with their kids' eyesight? It never seemed to occur to them to do this. I remember asking the school nurse if there was some reason why I had never been notified of the results of my kids' eye exams. Apparently the eye exams have no purpose at all, other than just for ****s and grins, and to employ a few extra people.

Of course you run into the same thing at doctors' offices: You take your kid in for impetigo--which their grandma could diagnose--but which medical professionals seem unable to diagnose without running tests. When you call back to the office to find out the results of the tests, they are dumbfounded that you want to know. The assumption is that you know you are being billed for a lot of silly, impertinent bull****. They didn't do a culture. What they did was test blood hematocrit and have a look at a container of*****, for no apparent reason. I've sometimes wondered if they don't draw blood and have the kid pee in a cup, toss the samples in the trash, and bill you for tests.

Sharon,

Yeah in ranting about this I only feel bad for those doing their jobs, really that's all you can ask.

The problem is how many Vice Principals of a Grade School are necessary so that the Principle can sit on his ass and deliver speeches at PTA meetings?

The whole system is screwed up, parents won't discipline the kids, the good teachers are caught between ****ty parents and ****ty administrations, hell give any teacher a few years and it seems like the system starts to suck the life out of them.

Doctors by the way are worthless too, we drive 50 miles to see our doctor who's older than dirt, when we go see him he just tells us what we have and very very rarely does any tests at all, in fact I think in 15 years or so he's done one on me on a mole I had, that was it other than routine physical blood tests for the normal things.

Mrholty - here ya go

http://www.hoover.org/publications/ednex....

STANFORD -- Do Americans have an accurate grasp of how much is currently being spent on public education? Not according to a recent analysis of national survey results by University of Chicago’s William Howell and Brown University’s Martin R. West published in the summer issue of Education Next. The average respondent surveyed in 2007 thought per pupil spending in their district was just $4,231 dollars, even though the actual average spending per pupil among districts was $10,377 in 2005 (the most recent year for which data are available).

Howell and West also found Americans think that teachers earn far less than is actually the case. On average, the public underestimated average teacher salaries in their own state by $14,370. The average estimate among survey respondents was $33,054, while average teacher salary nationally in 2005 was actually $47,602.

Almost 96 percent of the public underestimate either per-pupil spending in their districts or teacher salaries in their states.

As a personal note - the per pupil rate in my district this year is $14.3k.