posted on Feb, 2 2014 @ 12:18 PM
reply to post by marbles87
I agree of course, and at least the poor don't get worse books within the same school, but from school to school, poor kids get worse everything. The
beauty is that schools are funded by property taxes, so if I own a house on the golf course and several duplexes in the ghetto, my kids are gonna have
a well funded school because there are plenty of big fish sharing the cost and they don't all have kids. Then I lobby for lower property taxes in the
neighboring city where my rental properties are and I save the money while the people who exist only to pay me suffer. If we were the least bit
serious about education we'd centralize funding, standards, and purchasing so that we get enough for everyone at the best price. But by design we get
just enough for those who are chosen at a tidy markup, and the rest pay whatever they can to get nothing at all.
I went to a poor, mostly Hispanic highschool ten miles down the road from a big golf course sign that says "playground of presidents". Our school
was 50 years old and had 20 computers for over 2000 kids- their schools were 10-20 years old with multiple computer labs. Our books were falling apart
and the school kept trying to charge people for damaging them, they had new ones plus classroom sets so they didn't have to carry them in every day.
Our school was so underfunded and ignored that we were literally still participating in programs that no longer existed- when the California national
guard's version of jrotc had zero funding and zero staffing at the state level, nobody ever filed papers to switch our school to a different program
or even to close our chapter- so the drivers ed teacher just baby sat a bunch of kids in camouflage who weren't doing anything for 3 years. The
neighboring rich school kept the same program in fact, and the first thing they did, I kid you not, was claim to be the local headquarters and
requisition a bunch of our equipment out from under us.
The state has concluded that there is nothing in the poorer schools that would make them responsible for the high cancer rate among teachers there,
but then they got caught using contaminated fill dirt when they finally rebuilt my former high school. They say all that's wrong is that the dirt
can't be compacted, but my former school has held class in trailers in the parking lot of an abandoned grocery store for over a year now and the
night watchman just walks around the construction fence and refuses to actually go onto the school grounds. (And for those who've never studied
algebra in a trailer in the Mojave desert, you're missing an experience).
In Desert Hot Springs (the ghetto north of Palm Springs where they place parolees) they actually had the new high school built by an architect who
exclusively designs prisons.
Meanwhile the white upper middle class schools have money to recruit athletes to transfer across district lines.
I could go on and on. It's almost as if the whole point of educating the poor is to get them used to being cheated.