Tuesday, August 4, 2015

Not In Kansas Anymore

Teachers are leaving Kansas by the busload.

News came two weeks ago that Kansas has taken a bold new step in making their schools Even Worse. The story is one of how several current trends intersect to drag schools backwards in defiance of common sense or educational concern.

July 14, the Kansas State Board of Education voted to allow unlicensed people to teach in Kansas schools.

Their motivations are not hard to explain. Kansas has entered the Chase Teachers Out of The State derby, joining states like North Carolina and Arizona in the attempt to make teaching unappealing as a career and untenable as a way for grown-ups to support a family. Kansas favors the two-pronged technique. With one prong, you strip teachers of job protections and bargaining rights, so that you can fire them at any time for any reason and pay them as little as you like. With the other prong, you strip funding from schools, so that teachers have to accomplish more and more on a budget of $1.95 (and if they can’t get it done, see prong number one).

The result is predictable. Kansas is solidly settled onto the list of Places Teachers Work As Their Very Last Choice. It’s working out great for Missouri; their school districts have teacher recruitment billboards up in Kansas. But in Kansas, there’s a teacher shortage.

This all started when Gov. Sam Brownback (R) slashed the state budget in 2012 by gigantic proportions, hoping to show the world that doing so would prove Reaganomics worked: cut taxes and businesses would flock to the state and the economy would boom.  Instead it went down like a turd in a well and the state hemorrhaged money.  While the rest of the country recovered from the recession, Kansas got worse.  Rather than acknowledge the error of his ways, Gov. Brownback touted the results as a huge success the same way that North Korea tells the world that their famine-ridden starving nation was the envy of the world.

I’m sorry that the teachers are leaving and I wish them the best of luck in their new careers elsewhere.  But I really feel sorry for the kids who are left behind in more ways than one.

3 barks and woofs on “Not In Kansas Anymore

  1. The school funding shenanigans happening here in Arizona will be great for future research papers on how short time thinking ruins long term progress. Our Koch owned legislature has shifted funds, ignored the courts, robbed from the counties, and diverted funding from our college system in the name of lower taxes (for businesses). They haven’t pulled a Walker (yet), but I’m sure there are plans.

  2. Your nephew’s wife just left her job as a science teacher in a Kansas high school. She hated the job’s environment and escaped to a school in rural Indiana. Peace, quiet and a new enlightened administration will make her new job a dream. When will people come to understand that you can’t get an education, paid for by the taxes of the previous generation, and then refuse to do the same for those kids following along? AND then complain that you can’t find qualified workers?

  3. @FC: Educated kids and qualified workers come from different buckets in Teahadistan. Same as guest workers and illegal immigrants. One of the chief failures of modern conservatistism is its consistent failure to make the necessary connections.

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