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There’s far more than enough money to go around, it is that most spending is inefficient. Lunches should be free and healthy, books should be free unless it’s intentionally damaged, teachers should be paid well (60k minimum) and management should take a pay cut.
60k was pre 2020 rate, they should be paid 100k+ for how much training and bullshit they have to go through.
150k in like NY, SD, LA, SF. Maybe closer to 60k in Beckley WV. Cost of living and taxes aren’t the same everywhere.
Beckley deserves so much more than to be a tourist trap where people get told lies about the union
Lol I literally just picked it off the map. I really wasn’t expecting anyone in this thread to know that location intimately.
it’s just down the road from me. it’s a convergence point between a bunch of mining towns so it’s a bit of a significant labor organization point in central Appalachia. it’s also where Mother Jones founded the UMWA. also prior to European colonization it access between the Allegheny highlands and the great valley made it an ideal trading hub thanks to the New River, so it holds significance to indigenous rights organizers in Appalachia as well. the fact that the median income is $19k/yr is very much a policy choice of enforcing poverty
A lot of interesting information. I’ve found in personal experience the further west one travels the less connected people are to their geographic location. Maybe also it’s an aspect of smaller and bigger states. Like small states seem to have a lot of people with a lot of awareness of the local history and pride vs bigger states it’s very difficult to find someone like that. Maybe a third aspect is high traffic states, aka locations with lots of transplants vs areas with essentially none. So by the time you reach Southern California it’s nearly impossible to casually meet someone who knows anything about the local history much less has a serious pride or attachment to the location.
NYC teachers max out at about $124,000 after 15+ years and if they have a master’s. That’s not some huge amount in NYC. At least they get a pension so they can move to Costa Rica after they retire and live somewhat comfortably.
As a Costarican, I can tell you that inflation will bite them hard when they arrive. Anything below $25K USD a year will have them scrounging, and that’s not even counting the apartment rates or a cleaner service.
That’s livable in that area for the most part. I imagine engineers range 80k to 180k in the same area unless they work their way into management or are in a particular in demand field.
There are some issues around corruption and school management. Schools near me requested substantial funding to replace aging AC units. The very next year after they got it, a number of the AC units failed, and they couldn’t replace them. An audit showed that the entire funding for the AC replacement was divided among the top administrators and paid as a bonus.
That said, the way to stop that from happening isn’t to defund public schools and just repeat the same problem with private schools. You put in some oversight. You make them provide reports for the funding, spot-check, and trust with verification.
Pushing kids into private schools by defunding will make education (and safety) impossible to monitor.
And they all got prison sentences, right? Right? Of course they didn’t…
My local school district (that I actually work for as a bus driver) brought in a new superintendent for $600,000 a year. Did fuck all except for bringing in a bunch of his cronies to work meaningless jobs for over $200,000 a year and pissing off the teachers with more meaningless busywork. Three years into his six-year contract the school board had to run him out, by basically offering him his remaining $1.8 million to leave peacefully.
If only there were some entity designed to oversee education and how public schools are run…
60K minimum indeed is a minimum these days
Teachers should be paid more than, say, marketing people at a blockchain AI startup. Teachers add value to the world.
NYC teachers already start at $68,902 per year. That’s not really “paid well” though considering it’s NYC.
Yeah when I said 60K minimum I was thinking 60k West Virginia not 60K NYC.
Funding schools framed as corruption.
Welcome to neoliberalism.
What do you think neoliberalism is?
You don’t get it! Everything Mandamni does is bad because the uhmmmm, the uhhhhh
Scary commie muslim
“If he was a good person God would have made him white”
They won’t say that out loud, but this is what they really think, deep inside of the shriveled cockles of their black hearts
I wouldn’t say everything Mamdani does is bad. I would support his opposition to Israel, & I would be happy if he could somehow arrest Netanyahu.
That said, I think his rent freeze policy is a bad idea. A rent freeze is just the government forcing landlords not to be able to raise rents when a tenant leaves, even if the cost of providing the good has gone up.
I don’t think the government should make it harder for private businesses to provide goods & services. Rent freezes hurt smaller landlords, leaving only the biggest companies able to afford staying in the market. They also lead to rundown buildings, which the government could then use as an excuse to step in and take over those properties. That is probably Mamdani’s intent & goal, since undermining the effectiveness of capitalism could popularize socialism.
good thing “providing” housing costs nothing. it only makes money. you get the equity of owning the building and the rent. the cost of upkeep is always FAR behind rent. the idea that providing housing costs a huge amount of money is absurd. It’s parasitic. If the people paying the rent, which is the upkeep and additional profit, owned the equity, they would also eventually break even and make money. Talking to people like they aren’t smart enough to understand how badly they are getting robbed, isn’t an argument. it’s assholery.
Honestly, I’m under the impression that building a building requires scarce resources and labor, which have opportunity costs reflected in market prices, and maintaining a building likewise requires ongoing expenditures. I would agree that, when someone becomes a landlord, the goal is generally to earn a return on the capital they risk, while facing uncertainties such as tenants not paying rent, changes in government policy, and other market risks. Whether any particular landlord is a good or bad person is something I can’t really speak to.
a building is an asset, not a liability, it always increases in value, and even if it is burned to the ground on a higher than average rate, the land it’s on remains incredibly valuable and an asset. the people living there are losing money. the people who own it are gaining money WITHOUT TENANTS. the equity goes up. period. that’s why people go into debt to own the land. because it’s an asset.
Just because the cost to produce something goes up doesn’t mean the product price needs to go up.
If Trump goes to war with Iran, the price of oil goes up. Since you’re restricting supply, things like airfare also go up because they rely on jet fuel to provide their service. It’s the same with housing. It’s all supply & demand.
Yes and a price limit could be applied to oil there just isn’t. This technically causes a “shortage” (which means something specific not just whatever you think) but housing and oil are complex markets and there’s a lot of nuance. Also housing doesn’t get consumed or ever move. It’s not like the landlord can ship a building somewhere that rents are higher.
public school budgets can’t be bloated, only misappropriated.
Which usually happens under dipshit republican school boards.
“this man is investing in making kids smarter rather than making my stock portfolio increase by an additional 0.0001% and this makes him an existential threat to society”
-NY Post, translated from news editese
It’s up there with the Washington Times, which is owned by a korean anti-communist cult (the moonies) that’s full of sex crimes.
… that’s the Washington Times, not to be confused with the Washington Post (a far more legitimate news outlet).
Except that the Washington Post is now owned by Bezos, and had been pretty shit on these sorts of things as well ever since.
Oh yeah, I forgot he bought that. Is Bari Weiss in charge yet?
The Washington Post, owened by Jeff Bezos?
Those greedy teachers wanting to eat three meals a day! The gall of these people!
Jesus Christ on a crutch, NYC teachers start at $68,902 per year. That sounds kind of OK until you factor in the cost of … fucking everything there.
Ah you want a roof over your head? I’ll just take 75 percent of your income for this here glorified broomcloset please and thank you.
Someone was asking about how they were going to spin this, were they getting ideas?
If we privatize the schools, train the lower class for work and motherhood, this will.be a Fair Society! The weak stay in their place.
[this is what Conservatives actually believe]
The conservative goal would be for schooling to be as affordable as possible, without artificial barriers restricting supply for the benefit of unions rather than students. I can’t really speak for all conservatives because, first, I’m not one, & second, there’s a huge diversity of thought within conservatism. For example, some conservatives support Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza, while others oppose them, so there are obvious huge differences of opinion within the tent that is ‘conservatism’.
What monetary evidence have you seen that makes you think unions are the most expensive barrier to education?
All the evidence I’ve seen has shown education costs have outpaced even CEO/administrative pay (one of the highest rising costs in society, dwarfing even housing inflation.)
Chalking it up to unions and union workers (whose pay is often rising at inflation rates or below) seems a bit absurd.
To use a metaphor its like saying we should address a sinking ship by opening an umbrella on the roof to deflect rain instead of finding and sealing the actual holes. Maybe the rain adds to the water but shouldn’t we be discussing the hole first: rising cost of living and administrative costs.
The hyperfixation on eliminating unions while ignoring real problems and costs seems less like ‘conservative fiscal responsibility’ and more like ‘2011 Scott Walker corruption ideology’
I shouldn’t have only mentioned unions. A better way to put it is that I take issue with education when it isn’t oriented to serve the consumer (i.e., the parent or student). I would oppose eliminating unions, as I actually like many of them; I just don’t like closed-shop unions. I also like worker cooperatives, but I don’t support mandating them.
Realistically though, lets set aside unions as they are at best irrelevant to any real discussion of education and at worst simply the subject of cold war hyperfixation and irrational fear.
What is a real cost saving measure that could be brought to education?
Technology fees, subscriptions and infrastruction are, for instance, a major cost burden that has arisen in the last 40 years during the course of time where educational costs have skyrocketed. Why don’t I ever see conservatives talking about reducing educational technology costs?
There is a similar problem with legal and administrative costs as well.
I tell people to try to take the GED & graduate high school early (since it’s a waste of time & full of propaganda), then save money on their first year of college by taking CLEP exams using vouchers provided through completing Modern States courses.
There’s a lot to be said for community college transfers, testing out of credits etc from a purchaser perspective. While that can help individual students I don’t think it addresses larger problems about rising costs in the academic sector and the fact that high costs make planning and attending colleges a high cost, moderate risk proposition.
For instance, an ideal college system would reduce need for corporations to request h1b visas
The level of bureacracy (both for students and institutions) required to maintain so many grant and voucher systems including secondary bureacratic patchworks like H1b visas could all be drastically reduced by subsidizing college tuiton prices across the board to the point where college costs were less of a financial burden.
One might argue that eliminating tuition costs entirely would pay for itself in reduced bureacratic burden across the government and would make it easier for corporations to retrain employees rather than importing them.
this is what Conservatives actually believe
It kind of is! They believe in hierarchy, and that people need to be in their correct place for the world to work. It’s a reason they oppose things like social programs- things that try to bring people up contradict the natural order and lead to bad times!
They’re kind of bad people, fundamentally.
Hierarchy is simply a reality. Believing in hierarchy is like believing in reality itself (i.e. someone is going to be better than me at weaving baskets voilà you have a hierarchy: simple as). But “conservative” is too broad a label, because neoconservatives & paleoconservatives disagree dramatically. More right-liberal or libertarian-leaning conservatives generally do not oppose voluntary associations. That is their thing. They love open-source, volunteering, agorism, & so on. I do not know enough about neoconservatives to comment extensively, but they seem probably so obsessively pro-Israel & would likely change their views to anything if it helped Israel.
There is no obvious limit to what can be considered “charity.” So, if the government takes responsibility for providing charity instead of leaving it to individuals and communities, it can use that as a reason to keep expanding its power and responsibilities.
Thomas Jefferson in 1817. He penned, “Our tenet ever was that Congress had not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but were restrained to those specifically enumerated so it could not have been meant they should raise money for purposes which the enumeration did not place under their action.
In 1794, James Madison stood on the House floor and objected, “I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents…Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.”
Hierarchy is simply a reality. Believing in hierarchy is like believing in reality itself (i.e. someone is going to be better than me at weaving baskets voilà you have a hierarchy: simple as).
That’s not exactly what was meant by hierarchy. It’s more like having some people rule over others is good and natural. And that people don’t really change their station in life. You’re a peasant so course the royal family rules over you. They’re good at ruling. Perhaps innately.
There is no obvious limit to what can be considered “charity.” So, if the government takes responsibility for providing charity instead of leaving it to individuals and communities, it can use that as a reason to keep expanding its power and responsibilities.
I don’t find this a compelling argument. “Something bad might happen so we shouldn’t do anything”. I’m sure many of the people suffering from lack of food, shelter, and health care also do not find it compelling. You shouldn’t go outside because bad things can happen there. You shouldn’t lend your phone to your friend because there’s no obvious limit what they can do with it. You can use this argument to avoid anything.
The appeal to the “founding fathers” is not very effective. They lived a very long time ago in a very different world, and were not saints.
We both (probably) view ourselves as good people (or at least as people who strive for that). However, I believe your policies cause people to suffer from a lack of food, shelter, & healthcare (e.g., whether you are a Republican, Democratic Socialist, MAGA, Democrat, etc.). Your politics drive up the cost of supplying these necessities by creating barriers to entry for those who provide them, dictating how and to what extent they can operate. While I think many of the founders were excellent architects of a governance system, I do not view them as saints or possess any sort of hagiomania toward them.
“fucking communists and their education fetish” -
NYTNYPThis one is New York Post.
Y’all may not like it, but this is actually smart coverage for the NY Post.
I mean, if we properly educate children then who is going to read the NY Post once the boomers die? Education is a direct threat to the future of their company.
The Post is only fulfilling its original purpose since it was founded by Alexander Hamilton; it is a political mouthpiece for the moneyed interests in New York City.
One of their earliest political hit pieces absolutely decimated John Adams’ already tenuous political career in the public eye and ultimately paved the way for Jeffersonian politics to calcify around the heart of our nation’s politics.
Huh I would have thought the NYP was founded in like 1980 or something
It’s a tabloid. Nothing more.
Unfortunately, modern Americans are too stupid to know the difference between tabloids and actual news.
News? Like, from Facebook?
How will we pay for all the bombs we need if all those stupid schools use up all the money?!
Fuck the NYP, but sadly both can be true.
Look at the University of California. Paying slave’s wages to faculty in spite of ever-increasing tuitions that only feed a giant tumor called “admin.”
Look at the University of California.
There was a lot of money that UC funneled to construction companies and banks during the LIBOR rigging scandal. It affected a lot of universities around the country, and became big news when Harvard sued to get their money back. The UC Regents said “nothin to see here” and elected not to pursue getting the stolen money back. Shortly after, one of those regents got a VP gig at Wells Fargo (with no prior banking experience).
So yeah… fuck the NYP for sure, but education budgets are badly bloated and the crookedness is rampant.
