The Dirty, Little Secret in America’s Education Wars? Money Matters
Photograph; From left to right: Five year old Taylor Weber, in pink in middle, helps her older brother Andrew Weber, 8, right in green, hold up a protest sign they made by hand. The two go to Hutchinson Elementary School in Lakewood and are on a furlough day from school. At left are Chole Meldahl, 5, who attends Stober Elementary School and Logan Gill, in sunglasses, 8, who attends Red Rocks Elementary School. | The Denver Post | Helen H. Richardson
By Jeff Bryant | Originally Published at Campaign for America’s Future. June 20, 2014
An interesting twist in the ever-fascinating narrative of Republican politics unfolded in Mississippi this month when political operatives in the campaign to reelect U.S. Senator Thad Cochran to another term attacked their primary challenger for wanting to “deeply cut federal education dollars on which Mississippi schools rely.”
Wait a sec – don’t all Republicans, especially from deep red states in the South, want to deeply cut federal spending? Apparently not, according to what the article identified as, “establishment Republicans” backing the senator, who they say “would protect money for students and teachers.”
The dirty, little secret in America’s education wars is that spending more money on schools is what most people really want – and for good reason, because it really tends to help. Yet what we’ve been seeing in the “reform” agenda that has dominated the debate is an emphasis on anything but.
The conventional wisdom tends to be that asking for more money is a policy cop-out – throwing money at the problem, while the Very Serious People grapple with the ever-more-so weighty topics of Value Added Measures and Adequate Yearly Progress.
Meanwhile, in other sectors, the act of merely spending more money matters a lot to people who are also taken pretty seriously – like the folks at the International Monetary Fund. When the IMF announced its recent decision to downgrade its forecast for U.S. economic growth in the coming year, a significant reason empathyeducates – The Dirty, Little Secret in America’s Education Wars? Money Matters:
No, Gay Isn’t the New Black
Photograph; Ernest Owens | Ernest Media Empire, Incorporated. By Ernest Owens | Originally Published at Huffington Post. Black Voices. July 8, 2014 5:38 PM EDT As society “progress,” we have become a bunch of cultural sycophants obsessed with creating false affirmations and pseudo-solidarities. I quite frankly cannot […]
