Friday, March 12, 2010
No, it's not a budget problem
CNN is discussing plans by several big-city schools to eliminate buildings. CNN describes this as an answer to budget cuts, and treats it as horrible and intolerable. Nope, budget cuts are only incidental, and trimming a system to fit its population should be normal practice.
KC's schools have been so bad that all parents who cared about their kids took them out. This was already true in 1980; the tyrannical and pointless expenditure forced by Not-Yet-Hanged Enemy Agent Russell Clark in 1985 didn't change anything except to bankrupt the district. Adding new Disneyland-quality facilities doesn't help if you don't change the teachers and their idiotic assumptions.
Detroit is even less complicated: the city is imploding, returning to farmland.
Maintaining lots of half-empty school buildings makes no sense at any time, but the pressure of the unions and the ever-growing administrations forced legislatures to keep the system large even while its purpose disappeared. (See Parkinson's First Law.)
The budget pressure finally comes into play at this very late date, after a decade of pure waste. Legislatures finally have absolutely no choice, no excuses, and they HATE IT! HATE IT! HATE IT! Well, it's about goddamn time. Eat frugality, you monstrous fuckholes. Eat it hard and raw.
= = = = =
Sidenote: It's amusing, in a clinical-psychology way, to watch the brand-R establishment types like Rush and Dreher wrestling with this question. The Compassionate Conservatives have decided, for their own incomprehensible reasons, to buy into the Grand Leftist Falsehood that all humans are identical grains of sand, therefore all apparent differences in intelligence result from environment or social constructs. When you start from bizarrely false assumptions, there's no way you can reach a good conclusion or a useful solution. ¶ 7:01 AM
KC's schools have been so bad that all parents who cared about their kids took them out. This was already true in 1980; the tyrannical and pointless expenditure forced by Not-Yet-Hanged Enemy Agent Russell Clark in 1985 didn't change anything except to bankrupt the district. Adding new Disneyland-quality facilities doesn't help if you don't change the teachers and their idiotic assumptions.
Detroit is even less complicated: the city is imploding, returning to farmland.
Maintaining lots of half-empty school buildings makes no sense at any time, but the pressure of the unions and the ever-growing administrations forced legislatures to keep the system large even while its purpose disappeared. (See Parkinson's First Law.)
The budget pressure finally comes into play at this very late date, after a decade of pure waste. Legislatures finally have absolutely no choice, no excuses, and they HATE IT! HATE IT! HATE IT! Well, it's about goddamn time. Eat frugality, you monstrous fuckholes. Eat it hard and raw.
= = = = =
Sidenote: It's amusing, in a clinical-psychology way, to watch the brand-R establishment types like Rush and Dreher wrestling with this question. The Compassionate Conservatives have decided, for their own incomprehensible reasons, to buy into the Grand Leftist Falsehood that all humans are identical grains of sand, therefore all apparent differences in intelligence result from environment or social constructs. When you start from bizarrely false assumptions, there's no way you can reach a good conclusion or a useful solution. ¶ 7:01 AM
