Are politicians encouraging students to dropout of school and educators to quit?
Politicians supposedly represent all citizens ““ men, women and children. Because children don’t vote, some politicians feel that they can ignore children and treat them as second-class people.
Detroit’s public schools remind some people of prisons. There are chains on doors, dirty water in water fountains, bathroom stalls that lack doors, floor tiles missing, peeling paint on ceilings and walls. Students lack computers and current textbooks. Students and teachers work in “temporary” non-air-conditioned buildings in the heat of the summer and non-heated building in the cold of the winter. This would not be allowed to happen in affluent suburban schools. The Detroit school system hasn’t been receiving enough money from the state legislature to fix its crumbling schools. The school district estimates that it needs $500 million to fix its schools. The state voted to allocate $25 million.
On a per pupil basis, the Detroit Community School District receives less state funding than Grosse Pointe Public Schools. Because Michigan allocates funding for schools based on property taxes (as do most states), Detroit with a low property school tax base gets $7,511 per student according to the 2017 budget, while Grosse Point, an affluent suburb gets State per-pupil funding while Grosse Point Public Schools gets $9,924. Does this happen in your school district? In your state?
Politicians claim (correctly) that education is expensive. But ignorance is far more expensive. Few complain about the cost of incarceration. And research indicates that 80+ percent of prisoners are school dropouts. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis found that the cost of incarceration now exceeds $1 trillion. In the 2010 fiscal year that came to $31,286 per person. No state budgets that much money for its schools.