E is for Education

The “Education” governor.

In the five years since Act 10 was passed, median salaries for teachers in the state have fallen by 2.6% and median benefits declined 18.6%, according to an analysis of state administrative databy the left-leaning Center for American Progress Action Fund.

In addition, 10.5% of public school teachers in Wisconsin left the profession after the 2010-2011 school year, up from 6.4% the year before. The exit rate remains elevated, at 8.8%.

As a consequence, the report found, Wisconsin’s educational workforce is less experienced: Teachers had an average of 13.9 years experience under their belt in the 2015-2016 academic year, down from 14.6 years in 2010-2011.

Gov. Scott Walker and the Republican-controlled legislature have cut over $1 billion from K-12 public schools since taking office and, by the end of the current budget cycle, will have doled out in excess of $1 billion in taxpayer dollars through the private school voucher program to unaccountable private and religious schools.

We certainly are getting an Education in what the effects of stripping the rights of teachers unions has done.

The paper’s author, Jason Baron, took advantage of what was essentially a natural experiment set up by the law. Act 10 did not affect all school districts at once — a handful of school districts were allowed to maintain union rules until their existing contract expired up to two years later. That helped isolate the immediate impact of the law.

Baron found that weakening unions led to declines in test scores, particularly in math and science. The effects were fairly large, comparable to sharply increasing class sizes. And the harm was not evenly distributed: Schools that started out furthest behind were hurt the most, while higher achieving schools saw no impact.

Who would have thought that making our teacher’s jobs harder for less pay has had a detrimental impact on the education of our children?

WAD.
Have to keep the electorate compliant for GOP propaganda.

And why might a lot of republicans not care?:

aka poorer, mostly democratic areas.

aka wealthier, more republican districts.

Not necessarily true. Some of the highest achieving schools are in the bluest areas of Wisconsin. Actually, more likely all of them. Wisconsin does have some inner city schools that are hurting, but not as much when compared to other states. It is the low population rural areas where schools are closing and districts are merging together that the real lack of money is being felt. In Wisconsin the poorer areas are increasingly the more rural areas (discounting Milwaukee)

I think Republicans do care, because a lot of the problems are happening in the rural areas of the state. It has just taken 8 years of Walker to make people realize that his plan for education is not working.
They drank the kool-aid of “Trust me, this plan will work”, and it hasn’t. WI continues to lag behind other states in the Midwest. Across the board you can see that “rural” schools have been dropping in their annual school report cards. For instance, the school district I attended high school in, has dropped from “exceeds” to “meets” when it comes to expectations. Attempting to further privatize education has not been doing well.

Wisconsin has always been in the upper end of the country’s school systems. But things have noticeably slipped in the last 8 years, as public schools have been slowly getting worse throughout the state, mostly in the rural areas of the state, and the inner city areas of Milwaukee.

Republicans who are of that vanishing breed of old-school conservatives should be up in arms about gutting education, because those folks actually believe in an educated, competent population. It’s the new breed of Trumpist neo-fascists who revel in ignorance, usually coupled with a fanatical belief in some religious jiggery-pokery, who celebrate the death of learning.

Interesting. I’ve lived in several states - all with some level of property tax based local school funding. The best-funded school districts were always in the highly affluent and strongly republican suburbs/exurbs. And all the old-school conservatives seemed quite OK with the status quo and resisted any attempts to equalize school funding.

Wisconsin doesn’t really have as many strongly Republican suburbs outside of the Milwaukee area. The Madison area suburbs are heavily liberal.

As someone who owes tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt, getting paid to make fun of DeVos’s tacky seaside decor is one of few ways to both feed myself and make myself feel better. With that, I’d like to dedicate this essay to all of the public school teachers who taught me how to write.

This, plus, historically, they kept minorities out of their schools and maintained segregation that way. They still do.

So, what happens when you refuse to find your schools on six different bond proposals? Less school!

Assuming their regular school day has 6 hours of class time, they’re losing a bit over 3 hours of class time a week. Although I suspect the effects on learning might be more than just the hours lost.

This isn’t a new thing - there’s more than 500 districts across 25 states with some form of four-day week.

It’s hard to say who is the biggest loser here - the kids getting less education, or the already-underpaid teachers and other school employees who will have an even harder time now.

It also means that parents will have to figure out what to do for that extra day, in cases where they are working.

My great fantasy isn’t to become a wizard or go to Mars, it’s that one day American’s of all types below the level of the 1% will wake up and realize that the only war against Americans is being waged against them, by the GOP and its allies.

That’s just good business. Turning a cost center into a revenue center.

Rough numbers that’s about $1000/kid/year.

“You don’t want to pass a levy? Fine. We’ll still get our money.”

Of course that shifts the burden of public education costs to those who are less likely to be able to afford it.

There’s a bit of evil involved here, but honestly they’re probably not making much, if anything, and it has to do with the demographics of students today.

There is a huge and growing underclass unable to afford food or child care, and the education system being pubically funded has unintentionally evolved to pick up the slack.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/parenting/wp/2017/03/09/reading-writing-and-hunger-more-than-13-million-kids-in-this-country-go-to-school-hungry/?utm_term=.e1dce68ad6a0

To give some perspective, this is probably concentrated in elementary students, and there were 51 million elementary students in 2017, so “13 million” really means 25%.

Without school lunches millions of children are going hungry. Whether it’s poverty, the fact that some families have stopped budgeting food because the school system picks it up for them, ect, Many, many school districts have school cafeterias (in certain districts) open 360 days a year because otherwise those students aren’t being fed.

School is also de facto child care at this point for millions, and there is a slow push to make school reflect the 8-5 working hours of adults, so that the gap between school hours and working hours is lessened.

The child care “supplement” is almost certainly because shrinking the week to 4 days would leave families that use school as free child care unable to work for that now school-free day, and they may be unable to get daycare only one day a week. $30 a day is probably a bit below the national average of $50 a day. But it just solidifies that education’s main role for far too many families is publicly funded daycare and nutrition.

I swear, every time I see the title of this thread, I want to change it to “E is for Edumacation.” It feels just like the “We are fucked-climate change” thread.

Sadly true. We have organizations here in West Michigan that specifically address this need, like Kids Food Basket. Government is involved too - a state grant (I think…might have been federal) paid for lunch every day this summer during the literacy program at the Refugee Education Center. But despite these other programs, school lunch is definitely an important source of nutrition for a lot of kids on the low end of the economic scale, and thus education budget crises hit more than just learning.

There will always be people who need the school lunch program, but the thing producing the scale of the problem now is low wages. People work hard, as much as they can, but don’t bring home enough pay to meet their family living expenses. It’s amazing how many social problems come back to that.

And Republicans would gladly (and keep trying) let Americans go hungry to pad the bottom line of the rich.