Education - It's A Funding Problem
By now most people are familiar with the Melissa Harris-Perry video where she accused us of having an old fashioned notion of our children belonging to us, when in fact they belong to the collective.
I believe MS. Harris-Perry has it wrong. We have been treating our children as belonging to the collective for a long time and that is one of the biggest problems with education.
We collectively pay for education. Ever since it was mandated in our country (and our state) we signed the social contract that says we will all pay for education because ultimately we will all benefit from preparing future generations.
While this payment was handled at the local level there were fewer problems. If the locals didn’t like the school teacher they chose, they replaced her. She was accountable to them because they paid her salary directly.
As we have expanded the means by which we pay for education, we have expanded the number of people who feel entitled to a say in what we at the local level are doing with their money. Government has a responsibility to the taxpayer to be responsible stewards of our money and to demand accountability. That is what has led us to our current predicament with education - the concept that we are accountable to the federal government for the goals that they have set for the money they send us. The