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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Joe NYC who wrote (370326)	2/8/2008 1:22:13 AM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1572247

Therein lies the problem.....everyone sees the education budget as finite. We have to be as willing to spend on education like we are with defense. Otherwise, you will never reduce and minimize the problems that exist while turning out a well educated population. Suppose you were to compare educational budget spent on your parents' generation, your generation and current generation. My WAG is that parents' < yours < current. So? Everything is more expensive than it was 50 years ago. Look. You have 15% of the population that are descendants of slaves who after liberation faced serious discrimination for the next hundred years or so. We talk about the soldiers coming back from a tour in Iraq that suffer from PTSD.....imagine what slavery and 100 years of discrimination does to the psyche of a population. It will take many decades to rectify the problems and schools are where the major work is being done. Add to that, the children of illegals who don't speak English and who go to school mal nourished. Then add to them, the waves of foreigners who are allowed to immigrant legally to this country, speaking most of the languages of the world.Then figure in the kids who come from single parent households or where both parents work. We expect today's schools to do deal with all of these problems on a financial shoestring. Now lets go back 50 years.........there were few illegals, rare were households where both parents working, couples rarely divorced, the only gangs were in West Side Story, and no one cared whether blacks got educated or not. Even if there was not inflation over the past 50 years, the cost of education would have to go up simply because of the increasing complexity of the problems schools have to face each day. So it is not the budget, but the societal problems that are dumped on current educational system that even increased budgets can't handle. I would say that there is number where these problems can be addressed adequately but we never ever get close to that number. American priorities seem to be elsewhere. And sometime in the not to distant future there will be a price to be paid for our negligence.