You must log in or register to comment.
Maybe you should throw more money at the problem. This eventually will help. Right?
Too bad we’ve never tried that with K-12 in living memory.
I have a feeling the results would be very different than giving money to
the capital defense force“law enforcement.”Except for the inherently fraudulent charter schools, of course, but those don’t count for a reason mentioned in the beginning of this overlong sentence.
Charter schools are a trojan horse to let the private sector bleed the last few drops of blood out of our sabotaged, decrepit, starved public K-12 system.
Segregation is bad. Rich kids, middle class kids, and poor kids in an area should have to go to the same public schools in the areas they live in, under force of law. The quality would improve so fast your head would spin. The owners don’t want education to improve for anyone but their kids though. Peasants capable of critical thought are explicitly against their interests.
Instead the rich kids are segregated to private schools to learn not to empathize with their future livestock.
The middle class kids and a handful of tokens are segregated to charter schools, likely to be indoctrinated with “conservative (racist, classist, and sociopathic) principles” at places like challenger schools.
And the poor kids and kids with busy laboring parents are segregated to the ruins of our public K-12 we starved to death. And surprise surprise most of the non-white kids go here. Everything old is new again.
How is this a society again?
That’s easy. It’s a society, just in collapse.
Collapses don’t occur overnight, they happen slowly and painfully through methods you’ve described above.
To expand on this, “school choice” is sold to several different audiences:
-
The well-intentioned parents who say “I can pull my kids out of a ‘failed’ public school” which only serves to remove anyone who might provide accountability or volunteer support for said schools, creating a death spiral. Fixing this would require some way to make parents understand the common-good aspect. You might be trying to help your own little Timmy today, but at the expense of everyone, inclluding Little Timmy in 2055 when the skilled-worker economy has tanked in his hometown.
-
The whackjob brigades, who will gravitate to whichever school gets the closest to teaching the Bible as literal fact while still qualifying for as a non-private school that thus getting the costs covered by the state. In most cases, we don’t want these parents anywhere near decision making processes.
-
Narrow use cases where there’s a viable argument for a different school program. Some charter schools positioned themselves as “last chance” programs, offering things like customized schedules for kids forced to choose between high school and work, or online-only programs before Covid made it a big deal. A sufficiently resourced public school system should have similar ability to offer options, but if you have a lot of small districts, maybe they need some ability to form cooperatives to fill these gaps.
I never quote understood the patchwork of school systems in the US-- one town might say “all the schools under one district, covering 80,000 students” and the next town has five different districts for elementary only, then others for high schools, and none of them have market-making buying power for anything from textbooks to teachers.
-
Surely, if we just give the police 80% of our cities budget instead of 70%, they’ll stop murdering innocent people and harassing minorities!
Many cities are literally being held hostage by their police force, who threaten to not only not do their jobs if held responsible for their actions or if their budget is lowered, in some instances police themselves will vow to become criminals if they are held to account.
The police system is literally strong men blackmailing entire communities into funding their own oppression.
Police don’t prevent crime, they don’t even solve crime, and they don’t protect people. The only thing they do with any competence is traffic control. We don’t need them.
Now thinking of it.
-If a crime happens, police are under no obligation to stop it.
-Once the crime happened, the solving if the crime falls under the jurisdiction of non-police (forensics, detectives, etc)
That means the only thing they do is abuse people on demand of those in power.
The only thing they do with any competence is traffic control.
They do? If that was the case, wouldn’t they actually do something with the rampant amount of bikes without mufflers?
Civilian oversight and budget appropriation are an important step.
And by oversight I mean complete voting and staffing powers
Make payouts come out of the pension fund. Shit would clean up real quick.
Also free Paid Vacation.
Is there an example of this happening? Would the money not be earmarked?
You’d think the fact that despite all the money for “training” the keep killing more and more people, would be evidence enough?
Well, the implication of the comic is that funds for police training go to police militarization. I’m asking if this actually happened, but like you suggest it’s probably more of a vibes thing.
Even in instances where it is used for training, often the training itself is problematic.
The answer is not to give more money to police, who already take in average between 30-70% of the entire budget in their cities. The answer is to work towards abolishing the police. This is done a few ways, all simultaneously. A good first step is things like Eugene Oregons CAHOOTS program or Denver’s STARS program.
See: https://whitebirdclinic.org/what-is-cahoots/
And: https://www.denverpost.com/2022/02/20/denver-star-program-expansion/Even if you believe in the myth that police are there to protect, 90% of the functions they currently serve have nothing to do with protection, but rather their primary purpose is to ensure compliance and subordination to the systems. Policing is inherently right wing work, and will forever attract primarily right wing individuals.
The vast majority of police functions could and are better served by civilians. So even in you believe that we need police, there’s evidence to show that we don’t need police performing nearly as many functions as they do now. If they are to remain, they should remain only as acute crisis response teams, on a primarily volunteer basis, much in the way the fire department works.
Oh, that all sounds great. I really was just curious about this specific case of using training money for buying tanks.
Of course it had to be Florida
their primary purpose is to ensure compliance and subordination to the systems.
Is the government not to ensure compliance? I don’t see how most laws would work if you don’t need to comply with them. The threat of violence is rarely used, but I would think it still needs to be there in some capacity.
@BartsBigBugBag Why would it be difficult to make sure the money goes into training? Usually government entities don’t get to decide what they’re spending money on…
Why would the training be any different than it has been previously? We don’t need more Dante Wrights training people, we need less police killing people. The easiest way to do that is to have less police and to give them less money. The majority of the functions police currently serve in our society are better served by civilians. Police departments take up to 70% of their entire cities budget, significantly cutting into programs that actually help people, like Eugene’s CAHOOTS program or subsidized housing.
You don’t lower crime by increasing criminalization. You lower crime by improving conditions for those most likely to commit criminal acts, the disaffected, the poor, the homeless, and the deranged. You lower crime by putting more money into direct methods of assistance, and preventing the situations that create criminality.
