This week Georgia teachers learned who among them are being laid off due to the economic crisis. Many other states around the U.S. are dealing with teacher layoffs as part of the economic crisis (this being the crisis under which the Obama administration is claiming to be creating jobs).
Some of the decisions on layoffs, we are being told, are based on performance. That may not be a bad thing for education. In other cases they appear to be based on seniority. That means that some of our most energetic and dynamic teachers are losing their jobs. And we are losing them.
Teacher layoffs are very symbolic of everything wrong in America today. As teachers lose their jobs we continue to fund state and federal construction projects, pay bureaucrats and politicians far more than they are worth, and pour money into the alleged ‘economic stimulus’ package that any honest reading shows is more pork barrel spending than real stimulus. Meantime, We the People are busily absorbed in American Idle (pun intended), the NBA playoffs, and a celebrity who claims he hired a team to find him girls (no, I am not linking to that story). Sales of celebrity and sports oriented magazines far exceed sales of news oriented newspapers and magazines. We the People have very screwed up priorities.
Note: please excuse my cliché abuse here; I am aware that I am preaching to the choir by writing this where you dear readers, the informed citizens, a minority in our nation, will read it.
Folks we are stealing from our children to fund our healthcare and to dig our way out of the economic mess that we created, via our culture and our government policies, over the past 50 years – No this is not just an Obama or Bush created crisis.
To solve this crisis, we cut the funding that is supposed to provide the education our children will use to do the work to pay for our largess. We are creating a generation of individuals that will be less able to compete with Asia economically (Europe should be no problem), saddling that generation with massive debt, and constraining them with an ever growing labyrinth of regulation and government commitments that can not be met. At some point we have to reverse this trend. We can not continue to grow the percentage of our citizenry that lives off the work of others. We are heading to economic stagnation.
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I guess I have so far bought the argument that the government needs to spend money and provide stimulus in the most expedient way to get things moving right away, and the more long-lasting changes in terms of government programs are of a different category. It’s hard to keep buying it in the face of teacher layoffs, although it’s state and local governments doing the firing. In New York, they’re considering actually eroding some standards (like requiring masters degrees for permanent certification) so they can get more federal money.
You must be slipping–I’m agreeing with you a lot lately.
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Lucy
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