State of Wednesday: That’s It. We Need To Stop Funding Public ‘Education’ Entirely
We’re looking at nine-figure increases in funding to support the increase in staff
Greetings, Dear Reader,
I’m going to bang that drum again.
Education in America needs to be nuked from orbit.
Let’s get after it.
WHAT THE HECK IS A ‘PARAPROFESSIONAL’?
I stumbled on a fun and dystopic little tool this morning.
The WANDA: K‑12 Workforce Data Tool out of the Edunomics Lab is a Georgetown University tool that tracks workforce and student enrollment in public education.
It excludes all private education.
Play around with it if you’d like; it’ll depress the hell out of you.
Although I was raised in Pennsylvania, I was born in New Jersey and know a bunch of teachers there.
Here’s NJ since 2019.
There are 5,098 fewer students and 11,157 more employees. That translates to somewhere between $800 million and $1 billion more per year in compensation.
The first thing that jumped out at me here was “paraprofessionals.” I had never encountered that term. So what the heck is a paraprofessional?
Paraprofessionals span the gamut in everything but curriculum development and implementation, which falls on full-time teachers. They do special education, behavioral mentorship, inclusion support, individual reading and math tutoring, and so on.
Because special needs reporting from parents and students has exploded, there are now often 3-4 adults per classroom. One teaches, the rest provide … individual training?
But wait, what’s “inclusion” support?
Classrooms used to segregate sped, or special education, students and students with behavioral issues. But that represented a “civil rights” challenge, apparently. So in order to re-integrate students with behavioral and learning disabilities, administrators started hiring a bunch of individual mentors in various specialties.
But while there have been “civil rights” victories under this “inclusion” method, the more traditional metrics for success have, as you might have guessed, cratered.
Just north of 50% of New Jersey’s students are proficient in reading. Frankly, I’m skeptical even of that figure, given how tests have been watered down. Along with education as a whole, standardized testing has taken a hit, in part, it’s my contention, to perpetuate a failing system.
I noticed this little tool because an education reform researcher at the American Enterprise Institute posted about it on Twitter. He used Chicago as an example.
Here we see again, massive increases in “paraprofessionals.” We also see, likewise with New Jersey, a large increase in teachers and “non-teaching school-based certified FTE.”
The latter group is also interesting. They can be custodians, coaches, food service people. They can also be clerical workers, instructional coaches, intervention specialists and school counselors.
In both cases, we’re looking at nine-figure increases in funding to support the increase in staff. In both cases, the most basic outcome – reading literacy – is not experiencing a requisite bump.
You know what is, though?
Let’s say 85% of NJ’s increase in staff was subject to unions like the New Jersey Education Association and possibly the American Federation of Teachers. This is actually a conservative estimate. If 9,500 more people are paying somewhere between $800 and $1,200 in yearly dues, that’s about $10 million more to the public sector unions.
And where does that money go?
Welcome, Dear Reader, to the self-licking ice cream cone of Democrat politics. It goes to Democrats! Who vote on things like appropriations for failing schools!
But, hey, at least second graders in New Jersey will know if they’re transgender.
The trigger warning on this news story almost sent me. WARNING: Adults reading this copy might be shocked by what a state wants to teach your children with tax dollars!
Over the past two decades, public schools (and universities, for that matter) dependent on public funds for survival seem to churn out higher percentages of illiterate future criminals, illiterate future left-wing activists, or gender-confused minors and lower percentages of kids who can read.
For an extra billion a year, they’re not making more productive members of society — that much is clear.
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The second graders might also think they are Superman or a princess or a turtle or a Barbie…sorry this age is way to young to be putting this in kids heads