Teachers in Portland, Oregon, went on strike Wednesday, shuttering school for some 45,000 students in Oregon’s biggest city
To me, the fact that not just teachers but students don’t have access to abundant school supplies at their schools is beyond the pale.
We have starved public education to death to continue to fund war and cut rich sociopath’s taxes.
This is a worthless garbage country with perverse incentives. If we aren’t willing to fund the most core of societal structures, like educating the future adults of society, we should collapse so something of worth can be built. We aren’t a society, we’re just a gold plated labor camp.
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K-12 needs pencils, markers, pens, construction paper, regular paper, notebooks, assignment folders, erasers, pencil sharpeners, call it what you want but books with text kids need to read when they get home, art supplies because yes art is important to development, and most actual developed nations unlike our gold plated shithole also provides technology like tablets or laptops of some kind to their kids, not just their rich kids at the right schools.
If your point is that we should race to the bottom and provide the cheapest possible nuts and bolts education devoid of any curriculum not directly tied to becoming an efficient wage slave by eliminating any creative expression in K-12, I would contend that such a society isn’t worth existing and those kids would be better off dead than to be taught their very lives and educations exist solely in service to our beloved economy.
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Apologies, your lead in made me jump to an incorrect conclusion about your motives.
There’s sadly a lot of very vocal people who would claim all a kid needs are bootstraps and a can-do attitude, and if they don’t succeed in life despite every obstacle in their way, they deserve their suffering somehow for making “bad decisions.”
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There would be so much more funding for education if the school system didn’t waste it on proprietary software and copyrighted materials.
Oh well. At least the businesses are happy.
What alternatives would you recommend?
So what ARE class sizes in Oregon?
I found this article from 2018 that says:
The [union negotiated] thresholds are 24 students for kindergarten classes, 26 for grades 1 to 3, and 28 for grades 4 to 5. For middle and high schools, the thresholds limit how many students teachers may see in a day: 150, or 220 for performance classes, for middle school; and 160, or 225 for performance classes, for high school.
That’s a better teacher to student ratio than I had growing up in what was considered a good school district.
The article talks about how class sizes can rise from there they just have to pay the teachers 3% more. It also depends on the students themselves. A couple or a single aggressive kid(s) can make a class spiral out of control.
Total support from up North in Washington State.
Union Proud!
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And yet, this country has billions of dollars to fund wars.
Federalism at its finest /s
