Red Counties and Public Schools

Ok…so this is only anecdotal evidence…but I going with it. I had to make an unplanned business trip to Door County Friday night – Saturday. Along HWY 42 just north of the Two Rivers high school is a billboard touting the advantages of the Two Rivers public school system. This is red Manitowoc County so the billboard took me by surprise…but do you suppose vouchers are starting to have an impact in red counties too? Or the continued cuts to public education? Not sure but it seems to be a strange expenditure if they don’t feel some sort of threat.

But one of the more interesting attributes that the billboard listed: Spanish taught K – 12…bilingual education. This maybe is something that Donald Trump, Mike Huckabee, et all should pay attention to…not everyone in red America thinks speaking Spanish is a bad idea.

Correction (maybe): My wife says that my memory is faulty and that it was Algoma Public Schools…which gets even interesting because they are in even redder Kewaunee County.

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14 thoughts on “Red Counties and Public Schools

  1. Everyone is starting to feel the pinch. It was easy when they red districts could say “Stick it to Milwaukee” but they’re soon going to see programs cut, teachers leaving and schools closing and all because they were whipped into a frenzy by the 1% to go after the least among us. They lack all compassion. Not only do they not receive any sympathy from me, I’m quite happy about it. Nothing is going to wake these idiots up until it has a direct affect on them.

  2. I have a different reaction to your anecdote Ed. I wonder who paid for the advertisement. Do public school systems have advertising budgets? If so, why? If you have to convince someone to accept a free service, you have problems. Or perhaps a third party paid for the ad. But that would be even weirder. How would a third party benefit from parents accepting a free service? Unless it is a teachers union ad. That might make sense insofar as they could be grooming the community for a raise.

    1. Like everything you troll by here, your theory falls flat on its a$$ with your first assertion. Public schools are NOT a free service, and now I am being forced to pay for religious schools and other private schools that are not being held to the same academic or enrollment standards.

      Government services, roads, utilities and regulated schools and the people necessary to administer these services are not private enterprise and were never designed to be, but were established for a shared responsibility to our society as a whole helping the least of us based on our ability to be able to fit into a “competitive,” economic system that dictates by its very nature, big winners financially, equals big losers on the other end.

      So just as retailers of child slave labor produced goods from India and Africa resort to deceptions like attempting to skirt the law by having alcohol available in their retail establishments to get potential clients inebriated enough to part with their money for things they don’t need and are second rate junk, this is what regrettably happens when forcing a socially valuable institution (healthy public schools, paying teachers well enough to keep them in your community and thriving) to “compete,” with private profit centers with the rigged regulations as they stand now. One is forced, depending on local situations and economies to waste education dollars just to attempt to provide for the social public good.

      So spending my tax dollars for private corporate profits is not something I see as any better than a rigged system forcing my socially beneficial public school to “compete,” to keep enrollment up. It is not one or the other, both contribute to undermining the social good that public schools were established to provide. It is all part of class warfare.

      1. Non, it is insulting that my children’s friends are surrounded by MPS scoops like Barack Obama high school that has a reading comprehension hovering around 5%. Until you try and raise African American children and grandchildren in the inner city of Milwaukee surrounded by failing schools you should check yourself regarding vouchers. White folk don’t seem to much care about my families needs.

        1. Harold,
          I think what you say is true. However, I would say some… Some white folk don’t seem to much care about your families needs. Let’s remember, the school may be named after Obama but it was Walkers brain child. Walker had the great idea to invest in alternative schools specializing in technical trades. Walker/Republicans are the ones who have abandoned the inner city and African Americans. http://bigstory.ap.org/article/14f798360d1c46408c2f00947eca08b1/capitol-hill-buzz-senator-refers-idiot-inner-city-kids
          http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/03/12/3394871/ryan-poverty-inner-city/
          http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/10/20/1337919/-With-voter-ID-on-hold-in-Wisconsin-Republicans-call-for-vigilantes
          Need more proof I’m willing to provide it.

    2. Whining for others to debate your comments and where are you now? Which part of my comment does not apply to the conversation or is not based on fact? Which part of your comment were or are you ready to prove or defend?

      When that treble hook obviously keeps getting embedded in the back of your head, you might want to consider a new hobby that doesn’t involve fishing, troller. You never know what you might catch.

      1. Well non, I quickly lost interest in what you had to say when you noted that public education is not free. I did write that of course knowing full well that public education is not free. It costs a boatload, far more than we are getting in return. But my point, which I suspect you conveniently didn’t get, is that once paid via taxes, is then “free” to those who enroll their children there. You could think of it as forcibly pre-paid if you prefer. Anyway, once you have been forced to pay for an education whether it is worth anything or not, you do not have to pay further. As such, it makes little sense to try to advertise or otherwise convince people to utilize that which they have already paid for, unless said service is of little, no, or negative value. As an aside, public education is indeed “free” for a good percentage of residents who don’t pay taxes.

        1. Exquisite word salad, denying what you said previously, and also, no one conveniently doesn’t get some point supposedly made that wasn’t actually made. In your new statement that schools cost a boatload, a complete 180 degree spin on your prior comment about costs, changing your prior statement is your definition of defending it? Glad we all understand that, now.

          And you seem to be implying that there is a segment of our entire US population that is not paying for public education, whose children are somehow takers by being given the same educational opportunities as, say someone like a US Rep Paul Ryan. Though his education obviously didn’t better him as a compassionate person other than to those with money whom he might eventually financially profit from, his public education allowed him to personally prosper. I suspect public costs for Ryan’s education is the type of failed return on social investment you mention.

          No, I do not consider public education costs for regulated public schools a forced cost. I understand every student is not going to pay back to society equally, (Ryan’s not off the government teat, yet) but overall without sharing the costs for all to have that same equal opportunity at an education, our nation would be far worse off (poverty, ill-health, crime, etc) than it is now.

          It is easy to understand that your myopic assessment here FAILS to understand that lower income families more often than not, turn into future tax-paying citizens with an education, than will occur without an education. Paul Ryan shows us there are no guarantees for societal greater good.

          In the last paragraph of my prior response to you (as you said you ignored the comment) profiteering is no better than needing to advertise to compete with schools that are not held to public school standards. And you obviously skipped my comment at the bottom that a very large majority of voucher recipients were not financially needy families in the latest expansions of the program. Why that doesn’t seem to bother you is what is weird in your illogical utterances.

          Oh and your incorrect notion that anyone only pays once for public education and needs to pay nothing further is aother bit of meaningless gibberish. I continue to pay my property tax school assessments annually, and wish those didn’t need to be distributed to Jesus riding a dinosaur, creationists.

          Three minutes of my coffee break gone. No comments about certain retailers needing to get clients drunk to sell them something?

        2. Denis,
          Sorry to say but you are still wrong.
          “once paid via taxes, is then free to those who enroll their children there” is not true at all. In the Waukesha School District, in which I currently have three children enrolled, you get a bill, which I just so happened to receive yesterday. For my oldest child the bill is $141.00 for the semester. This includes a book/material fee, 2 tech fees, health ed fee, bio fee and a Spanish 2 fee. This doesn’t include the $1500.00 plus we pay for the 1 (ONE) extracurricular activity that child participates in. Now, let’s remember I have three children, do the math and keep in mind this is per semester. Plus, I pay taxes! So, once I’ve been forced to pre-pay, which actually isn’t the way taxes work but that’s another argument, I DO HAVE TO PAY FURTHER.

          “Public education is indeed free for a good percentage of residents who don’t pay taxes”.

          Please provide me with examples of “residents who don’t pay taxes”. I think you can anticipate how my argument is going to develop so be wise in who you choose as the non tax payer.

  3. The competition for students predates Act 10, although I think Act 10 added an extra layer of nastiness, several extra layers in fact.
    I believe the competition for students really got going when people were allowed to go to any school district as long as they could get there themselves. In other words, if you didn’t mind hauling Junior two towns away you could take advantage of whatever you found appealing about the other school (within placement limits).
    My kids are grown and gone so I haven’t been following this with the same passion I did when they were students themselves, but I have heard anecdotally here in Washington County that the big student shifts were sports-related – a lot of moves to schools with strong sports programs (which were often part of strong academics offerings), and schools that were big fish in small sports ponds found that they had put all their resources into sports programs and didn’t have much else to tout when they couldn’t keep up.
    Obviously Act 10 didn’t help but I don’t think this is a charter school issue. It’s a quality of offerings issue, which will translate into a quality of educator issue, which – such a surprise – is translating into that headscratcher of a question: where have all the teachers gone?

  4. “….not everyone in red America thinks speaking Spanish is a bad idea.”

    Si senor Ed!

    Or in blue America.

    And in my limited Spanish to greet fellow parishioners from south of the border:

    Paz. Como estad usus, Amigo (Amiga) (Muchacha) (Muchacho).

  5. If this is happening on a wider scale, I will need to research it (when I have nothing else to do) as to what percent of an overall budget might be affected, and the reasons that may be peculiar to certain school districts.

    My theory is that where now something like 80% of the recipients of state vouchers are families who were financially well enough off to have been sending their children to specialized or religious schools already, for reasons that may or may not have been academic, public schools, operating under stricter requirements from the state (having to take every student and having to provide for every student’s education, including special needs of many kinds) still need to attempt to maintain their facilities and teacher load to do so, only with less state funding.

    Just as union members must now carry the free-loaders in what’s left of bargaining or legal representation, we as citizens are forced to carry wealthier families and their schools of choice. A capitalist frame of mind trumping the more democratic social justice and social good from which the public school system originated. All people being more highly educated would be a long term boon to our nation and our people. We still mostly view public education as a common good and a common need that benefits all of us.

    Public school advertising would only reflect the negative result of the state handing over tax payer funds to privateers that further destroys the public good behind the theory of public schooling and increases the chances of those proviteers to get a bigger slice of the pie without being required to meet the same standards as their, “competition.” IOW there is no animal as free market capitalism. It is a rigged system.

  6. Let’s be truly honest about the real motive behind voucher schools:
    MASS INDOCTRINATION for political purposes.
    More right winged little evangelical Christians running around the U.S. translates into more Republican votes.
    Profit is just an added benefit to these power hungry religious fanatics.

    Maybe Muslims should demand the same religious freedoms within, say, a private (voucher funded) Christian school. See how fast vouchers become a bad idea.

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