Burying the Lede ans

Here's the latest from Brad Hicks.  It's about funding schools, and there were so many interesting comments that I included them all. 
Find it here:  http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/445461.html 
--Kim


The Infamous Brad

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Burying the Lede

• Oct. 17th, 2010 at 10:43 AM

Because I watch the local NBC news and The Rachel Maddow Show, I've been seeing non-stop ads for their upcoming reality show "School Pride" about armies of volunteers swarming public schools to clean, repair, and upgrade them. And every time I saw one of those ads, I asked the same question: who's paying for it?

The Sunday NYT has a puff piece about the new series (Brian Stelter, " 'School Pride,' Reality TV Brings School Makeovers," New York Times, 10/14/10) that doesn't get around to addressing that question until the seventeenth paragraph, the fourth from the last: "For the most part NBC handled the TV production costs, while sponsors covered the renovation costs and made donations. Like other reality shows, product placement abounds, with Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Microsoft, and General Motors all playing starring roles for their contributions to the schools."

Translation: if we had higher taxes, so that every school could afford to buy all these building materials, computers, software, supplies, and vehicles, our schools wouldn't look like they do. Is this really terribly shocking? Once counties and states learned that they had to bid against each other in a destructive race to the bottom, first eliminating property taxes on corporate property and then, when that wasn't enough, handing out huge chunks of local taxpayer funded corporate welfare, in order to bid against each other for the too-few jobs that the corporations were auctioning off to the lowest bidder, pretty nearly every school except for the ones in a few very wealthy districts ran almost completely out of maintenance money.

And counties had no choice in the matter: run-down schools or high unemployment, it's not even all that hard to see which of the two hurts not just the county, but the kids as well, the more. So we learned to put up with schools that look, not just like prisons, but like long-abandoned prisons. When people move out to the exurbs for "good schools," it's not just to escape the feared black male students who might hurt (or worse, befriend) their precious white snowflakes, it has the bonus attraction of having school buildings that were built more recently, so they haven't had as much time to decay.

So I'm not terribly surprised that wealthy and powerful corporations donated money and materials to a fellow wealthy corporation, enough money and materials to remake just a couple of the country's thousands of decayed schools. They can count on that fellow wealthy corporation to package the school makeovers in such a way as to find some way to blame labor unions and lack of volunteers, not three decades of anti-tax blackmail and corporate welfare, for the state of our schools. And if they're very lucky, they can hope that remaking those five or ten schools or however few it is will stave off the pressure to raise the taxes it would take to fix the rest of them, and thereby make the issue go away for a little while longer.

Color me "not impressed."

• Mood: okay
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Comments     [BAD WORD ALERT]

( 22 comments ­ Leave a comment )

nebris wrote:
Oct. 17th, 2010 04:05 pm (UTC)
fixed
"the feared black male students who might fuck their precious white snowflakes"
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bradhicks wrote:
Oct. 17th, 2010 11:13 pm (UTC)
Re: fixed
Don't be unfair; that's not all that they're afraid of. Not only do they "know" that all black males are sexually voracious predators who can't resist white girls, they also "know" that all black males are drug-dealing gang members who might recruit their precious white snowflakes into gangs or forcibly make them take drugs.

If they don't say these things out loud, they think them; if they don't let themselves think them out loud, they're at a loss as to explain why they just "don't feel safe" and "don't feel like it's a good environment for their kids" as soon as there's more than one black male in the school, can't explain why they only feel safe when their kids are "around people who are our own kind" if they don't mean it racially.

(In case it's not obvious, no, I don't think that all white people think this way. Just so many of them as to power white flight to this very day. Why, right here in the St. Louis metro area, St. Charles County stopped growing and people started moving to meth-lab covered Jefferson County "for the schools" right at the point where St. Charles County passed the 5% black mark. Nobody moves to meth lab country "for the schools. Nobody moves to meth lab country "for the property values." They move to meth lab country because it's only 1% black; they feel safer with their kids going to school in an almost completely unfunded semi-rural school district where an amazing percentage of the other kids' parents are meth dealers, that's how fucked up white flight is.)

See also Richard Benjamin's excellent, well-researched, insightful, thought-provoking, and side-splittingly hilarious Searching for Whitopia, which I can't recommend highly enough. A good, fast read, I think most of you would enjoy the heck out of it.
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whip_lash wrote:
Oct. 18th, 2010 01:01 am (UTC)
Re: fixed
they're at a loss

I doubt they are. Most of them can probably explain it mathematically. That's one of the tools that standardized testing has given us: you can see that for each additional percentage x of minority students, test scores drop by percentage y.

What you think when you notice that may be racist, but needn't necessarily be. If you're liberal you can think (partly correctly, in my view) that standardized tests are flawed and that any real achievement gap exists in part because of a history of discrimination. And if you're conservative you can think (partly correctly, in my view) that minorities tend to be poor, and that except for recent immigrants, poor people tend to stay poor in part because of a culture of low achievement especially in education.

Should people of good will of either political persuasion try to make the local school better rather than running? Of course. Is it easy to do that when it's your kid's education on the line? Nope.
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whip_lash wrote:
Oct. 17th, 2010 04:06 pm (UTC)
Translation: if we had higher taxes, so that every school could afford to buy all these building materials, computers, software, supplies, and vehicles, our schools wouldn't look like they do.

Not sure if you have kids, but I assure you that affluent school districts do have all of these things.

So your transalation actually reduces to: If poor people had more money, poor people would have more money.

That's not a jab or a political point, as far as I'm concerned, by the way.
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bradhicks wrote:
Oct. 17th, 2010 04:34 pm (UTC)
Fair enough; we're mostly agreeing with each other there. But, for one thing, there aren't that many affluent districts in America. I don't have a count handy, but the St. Louis greater metro area has probably twenty or so school districts, and two of them, Ladue and to a lesser extent Parkway, have enough affluent residents that the property taxes can cover maintenance costs and routine upgrades even after all the corporate welfare giveaways are funded. The state's vastly larger number of rural school districts don't even have that many; there probably isn't a single rural district in Missouri that can afford to fully fund their maintenance budget.

But, secondly, just raising wages for poor people wouldn't help enough, if poor people's property didn't also appreciate. Centuries from now, some of the historians arguing over the dismal state of late-dark-age (20th and 21st century) schools will bring up the historically stupid and completely indefensible decision made all the way back in the 17th century, here in America, to have all school funding be local and almost all of that funded off of property taxes. A better system for guaranteeing that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer would be hard to design, even if you were doing so on purpose.
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kraygern wrote:
Oct. 17th, 2010 04:51 pm (UTC)
"Once counties and states learned that they had to bid against each other in a destructive race to the bottom, first eliminating property taxes on corporate property and then, when that wasn't enough, handing out huge chunks of local taxpayer funded corporate welfare, in order to bid against each other for the too-few jobs that the corporations were auctioning off to the lowest bidder, pretty nearly every school except for the ones in a few very wealthy districts ran almost completely out of maintenance money."

Can you explain more about how schools have been forced to "bid against each other", i.e. bid for what and from whom, and how this system was implemented in the first place?

How does corporate welfare directly ties into a shortage of school funding: i.e. what types of corporate welfare do you speak of?
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greymalkini wrote:
Oct. 17th, 2010 05:05 pm (UTC)
They competed to reduce taxes and tax-write offs. If county A offered 10% tax and county B was taxed at 5%, guess which one people would be moving to?

I think the welfare he is talking about are the tax breaks various states and counties would offer to corporations to open an office in the area.
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bradhicks wrote:
Oct. 17th, 2010 07:11 pm (UTC)
Not JUST tax breaks, it's frequently outright cash grants. For example, to get my old company, Mastercard International, to move from St. Louis County to St. Charles County (and to keep them from fulfilling their threat to move to Texas) they were given, flat out-right, at taxpayer expense, $190 million; a company that manufactures money for a living had their corporate campus built for them at taxpayer expense.

(I was out of town for a year and a half on business, working for myself, at the time. When I came back, and found this out from my state representative, I actually lost my temper over it and screamed at him, something I'd never normally do.)
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subnumine wrote:
Oct. 18th, 2010 12:40 am (UTC)
And it has been far more than thirty years. New Jersey, with 566 competing municipalities, has been worse than most, but the effects of repeatedly competing for the favors of corporations have been seen at least since 1920.
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(Anonymous) wrote:
Oct. 18th, 2010 03:29 am (UTC)
Maybe municipalities need to unionize?

Oh, wait. That's why it's supposed to be called the UNITED States.
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whip_lash wrote:
Oct. 18th, 2010 12:49 am (UTC)
Centuries from now, some of the historians arguing over the dismal state of late-dark-age (20th and 21st century) schools will bring up the historically stupid and completely indefensible decision made all the way back in the 17th century, here in America, to have all school funding be local and almost all of that funded off of property taxes.

Well, in Texas, we've already addressed this (by court order). The legislature implemented a plan popularly known as Robin Hood, which is pretty much what it sounds like. Rich districts (we actually have lots of these; affluent areas tended to make sure they got their own district) send a chunk of their cash to poor ones.

The result was kind of predictable if you think about it. Rich districts lowered their property taxes so that they wouldn't have to be rich districts and pay the luxury tax. Poor districts got some money, but not as much as they were expecting; about enough, in a number of spectacularly publicized cases, to squander on ludicrous administrator salaries and outright graft.

The rich districts made up the difference with donations and still have enough for things like, in nearby Southlake, a natatorium with Olympic-sized indoor pool attached to the high school (it's technically a community center, I believe, and so not a part of school funding).

Grapevine-Colleyville, the nearly as affluent district next to Southlake where my sister taught for a while, has a high-school Cisco certification program with a nicer lab than the community college where I did the same program. At Diamond Hill, a Fort Worth ISD school in a Hispanic Barrio where my sister also taught, she had to help the kids buy school supplies.

Robin Hood is one practical example of why I'm always skeptical that wealth distribution actually does any good beyond preventing outright starvation, let alone that the good outweighs the harm. I will freely admit I don't know of a better answer in the case of schools however.
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kimchalister wrote:
Oct. 19th, 2010 04:20 am (UTC)
Brad -- what system would you suggest for paying for schools? (I agree that local property taxes isn't working well.)
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bradhicks wrote:
Oct. 19th, 2010 04:27 pm (UTC)
1) Raise the progressive income tax and the capital gains tax by the amount that the nation collects in property taxes for schools right now, and distribute that amount to each school on a per-student-enrolled basis, with a small multiplier based on the percentage of students qualified to be enrolled in the free student breakfast and lunch programs.

2) Make it illegal for local communities and local charities to fund the schools beyond that; if they want better schools, throw the money into the pot to be distributed among all students.

Most people would call this radical and unworkable; I admit that it's unlikely to pass any time soon. Critics of this idea (which, by the way, isn't far off from one that the courts have come close to ordering in several states, including my own, because of state constitutional guarantees of an education for every child) will say that it's natural for parents to want the best for their children, and that this infringes on parents' natural right to give their children every advantage they can. To which I say: are poor parents' children not citizens? And what moral justification can you give, what legal justification can you give, what merit among rich kids can you point to, that justifies the government giving rich kids a better education than poor kids?

(And yes, while I'm at it, I would also outlaw private schools. As a private school graduate myself, I've seen what a blight on the country they are.)
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simulated_knave wrote:
Oct. 20th, 2010 02:46 am (UTC)
You mean the way Canada does it, IIRC?
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simulated_knave wrote:
Oct. 20th, 2010 02:47 am (UTC)
Well, education's provincial, so the equivalent would be raising state taxes, but the point stands.
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phillipalden wrote:
Oct. 17th, 2010 05:38 pm (UTC)
Here in California we're spending more on prisons than we are on education - something the Governor and other state politicians would rather the public not know.

And the majority of those prisoners are in there for non-violent drug offenses.
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kraygern wrote:
Oct. 17th, 2010 06:04 pm (UTC)
The prison/security industrial complex is big business in America, but especially California where I'm also from. Many of the 'tough on crime' and 'for the children' laws pushed are often backed by prison guard unions, private prison operators, and prison construction and security firms.
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phillipalden wrote:
Oct. 17th, 2010 10:37 pm (UTC)
Sadly, voters kept approving those so-called "get tough on crime" laws - without considering the ruined lives and the outrageous amount of money spent on prisons.

The Governor and many state legislators are "in bed" with the prison guard's union - a connection that Californians should be more aware of.

I love my home state, but it's seriously messed up in many ways.
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silveradept wrote:
Oct. 17th, 2010 08:17 pm (UTC)
For people who have looked at school systems with any sort of critical eye, I suspect this premise is not news. And NBC's presentation will shower the corporations with praise and not point out that white flight combined with corporate tax breaks is what got those schools into that situation in the first place.
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harmfulguy wrote:
Oct. 17th, 2010 10:54 pm (UTC)
After Gene Crannick's house burned down because he'd missed his "pay to spray" bill, the Professional Left podcast proposed that he put a sign out front saying, "Your Tax Cuts At Work". I think decaying schools (and other abandoned public works) would be an even better place for such signs.
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(Anonymous) wrote:
Oct. 18th, 2010 09:20 am (UTC)
It seems as though current leaders are treating our education system the way conquerors treated the Sumerian irrigation system. Why feed the cow when you can run off with the cheese?

(analogy shamelessly stolen from this article (http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/02/unnoticed-technologies.html), which I highly recommend)
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samael7 wrote:
Oct. 18th, 2010 06:20 pm (UTC)
Only somewhat related, the story reminded me of a plaque I saw at Versailles, thanking John D. Rockefeller (the person, not his foundation or legacy trusts) for financial assistance in restoring parts of the chateau and grounds in the early 20th century.

I wonder if there will be a plaque at those schools for Wal-Mart and Home Depot. I'm thinking "probably, with brand logos."

I don't have any very deep or well-formed thoughts about the comparison. It's just that I know history repeats itself, and I'm trying to figure out "how much."
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