All I need to know about South Dakota.
And Hockey.
And CU Mortgage Direct.
The stain… expands.
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In a pool full of mud.
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What a horrible idea! I remember in Highschool, at rallies or school fairs sometimes we would have a dunk tank teachers would volunteer for, which doesn’t seem too bad. But then I saw you were talking about pre-school!!! What a horrible lesson for those little kids. 
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Right? And they already have behavioral issues with some of the little ones. Fortunately they reconsidered this event, although they never should have proposed it in the first place.
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That would’ve made the best of the shitty situation!
Or, if they’d laid out the money into piles and used it to teach some lesson about economics, maybe showing symbolically how much of the town budget goes to schools versus cops. And then, I guess, resigning before they got fired.
But this is all daydreaming within a dystopian reality. Poor teachers.
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This is the really sad thing. It’s fun to think of ways to subvert this process. But in a truly individualist society, what you actually end up doing is paying tribute to the local warlord.
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Now that will draw a crowd. In swimsuits!
If it is all in good fun for everyone, they will have no problems with it.
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There is. All of us deciding that this is enough and pushing for systemic change.
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Agreed. Sadly, being a citizen and resident of Canada, I’m of no direct help to American teachers. But you can bet your ass that as the son of a teacher, friend of many teachers, and a one-time teacher myself, I do what I can, where I can.
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That’s a relatively recent change, though. There used to be much more federal school funding. The GOP started cutting it in the 80s, which squeezed states, who have also cut budgets, which in turn squeezed school districts. Now people complain loudly about their property taxes, but don’t see the connection it has to the evils of Reaganomics.
ETA: And I realize, historically, that’s not even the full story. It goes back much further than Reagan. Defunding of public schools started in earnest immediately after Brown vs. Board of Education. As soon as public schools were required to be desegregated, the defunding started.
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Do you have any more info on that? Everything I see shows federal funding increasing greatly, but it’s hard to find the numbers as a percentage of funding. In a few places I’ve seen 8% of school budgets come from federal funding–which would vary depending on how much everyone else kicks in.
Reading the comments makes me think of San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez (1973), which is just about 50 years old. It’s one of those close court cases that would have had a huge change if it went the other way. I got the impression at that time about 50% of funding was supposed to be local, while the rest came from state and federal funds. This says in recent years Texas gets about 6% from federal, 44% from state, and 50% from local funds.
This helps answer part of your question.
My understanding is that federal funding to states between 1920 and 1954 made up over half of public school funding, but it wasn’t earmarked for education- it’s just that’s what states used it for because that was one of their primary expenses. That funding dropped significantly in the 50s and again in the 80s to reach the paltry 8% it is now.
You won’t find that on the DoE website. Property taxes were invented in order to cover for the loss of funding. They also lead to the unequal distribution of funding regionally within states, with wealthier districts getting more funding unless, like in New York and Oregon, there are laws to redistribute the funding to cover the educational needs of every district.
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Every single teacher who had to participate in this gross charade should be given 5,000 dollars to spend on school supplies for years to come plus another 5,000 dollars as a bonus for caring so much about the children whom they teach.
Come to think of it, the above holds true for every single teacher, period.
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Straight out of The Magic Christian…
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Presumably the schools selected their strongest, fittest faculty to the dystopian educational Hunger Games
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Which, ironically they do because the plutocrats’ economy would be nothing without publicly funded education…
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They tried that in TX, and that’s when we got GWB. (Not blaming the effort; IIRC this issue was an arrow in their quiver and one can imagine how they whipped up North Dallasites about chipping in for, say, McAllen)
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