But the free market is still crucial. And I’m not referring to Chicago in 1922 type of free market. The police and courts if they functioned well would swiftly punish liars, cheats, killers and thieves up to and including execution. One of the problems with the Brave New World is the premium on criminality since our justice system does not work well and crime is effectively subsidized and encouraged (white collar and the rest both).

You are an Educrat I thake it. I don’t expect you to make the connection between free markets and your job. Our one size fits all “education” system is a luxury of waste and extravagance that is historically uncommon. It’s all going to fall down and go boom if and when we move into the Greater Depression that seems to be coming.

Study the State Budget. See what is going to be available for education. See how we spend the public education budget there is. This can’t go on much longer. Rather than reform public secondary schools I believe the state will see them just crash and burn.

And I believe your market failure is mainly a result of market meddling – the government preventing operators from running their own businesses (regulating into failure) while at the same time supporting bad actors. I see the government needing to relax regulation especially social regulation while speeding remedies for torts and breech of contracts. More anarchy and faster enforcement of contract rights and intentional and negligent harm. More power to the individual and less to the government. And much less guaranteed comfort levels for all.

I’m also trying to figure out how your free market system would provide the education that my former students have received at Cal, Harvard, Amherst, Georgetown, Stanford, Dartmouth, etc, etc, etc, because none of them paid for their college educations
themselves; rather, the cost thereof was picked up by the taxpayers and/or parents of students who can pay full freight. So they’re all SOL, I guess, and so are we, because the free market would leave them by the waysides, with nothing more than a high school education. Perhaps, before you compose your next puerile paean to the free market, you should pause to google, “market failure.” (Or perhaps not, since both founders of Google attended public high schools and got their bachelors degrees at public high schools)

And Nextset, with all due respect, somebody wasted a lot of money.

No. Education is not the single most important thing that the state provides its citizens.

Certainly not now.

Our citizens, especially the most productive class of people – pay for their own education leaving public “education” for the lower classes.

Free markets enforced with Police & prison services are the single most important thing lumped in with the court system and followed by infrastructure such as Power, Water, Roads. These are what make civilization possible. Education we can get (buy?) ourselves thank you very much.

And now that we get into this area, if the government steadily withdrew and allowed anarchy to come forward, we would probably settle into a more stable civilization. Never in the Wildest times of the Wild West did we have a “civilization” where parasites and predators dined so well on the productive citizens.

There have been plenty of stories published about what a society without much government would be like. “Alongside Night” comes to mind. It doesn’t sound very bad to me compared to what I see about to happen to this one. Basically people learn to be very careful about what they say and do, and without making yourself useful to others you starve and sicken.

The Obama crowd dreams that government can run everything and fix everything. History tells us the opposite. Government is the force behind the social problems we have in society. It’s sweet tasting poison. From the New Deal to the Civil “Rights” Movement government has warped behavior to the point that the producers in society must carry an ever increasing number of non-producers until USA society collapses into something else. Free Markets are the heart of freedom. Meddle with that and you can’t be free anymore.

I respectfully disagree with your disagreement. No t all public sector jobs are created equal. Education is the single most important thing that the state provides to its citizens. It creates wealth, opportunity, equity, you name it. That other stuff you mention is trivia in comparison.

So tell me, if we were offered a contract to double teacher salaries, increase class sizes to 75, and have teachers give scantron tests and bookwork every day, would you vote for it?

I agree with much of what you say, believe me. One of the reasons I DO value our union is that there’s a tradition in the United States by which teacher = self-sacrificing martyr. 100 years ago, most of us would have been women, and it would have been taken for granted that either our husbands contributed the “real” income to our homes, or that we still lived with our parents. In any case, we were all Very Nice People who taught for the joy of helping the children, so cool! In terms of money, teachers were suckers on a stick.

Perhaps some of us still are, which would explain why prison guards, etc. might make three times more money than we do. But the union does ensure us some degree of valuable perspective, on many levels.

Obviously, none of us has entered this profession to get rich. For me, there’s significant reward in being exploited to help out children who need me, as opposed to being exploited to help the corporate officers at my old multinational hub sell overpriced, shoddy junk to the trusting public. Now THAT felt like a waste of my Sundays!

In terms of my bank balance, it looked nothing like this, but THIS makes me want to get up in the morning…even on Sundays when report cards are due tomorrow.

If that makes me a chump, I’m old enough now to have a sense of humor about my chumpiness. But I sure wouldn’t want to be a non-union chump…not in this line of work.

I don’t think parents much care. They want a good education for their children. That’s where I am.

As for Walmart, I basically agree. Except, Oakland’s downtown SUCKED long before Walmart was even considered. In fact, it was more of a desperation move to save a FAILING business tax base.

Even if you believe Walmart destroys communities, it provides cheap detergent. Most folks have decided they aren’t willing to pay 40% more for detergent in order to keep a local guy in business, particularly when the local guy doesn’t live in the community his business serves anyway.

Actually, you’re wrong, Ms. McLaughlin, all teachers have contracts which are very specific about hours. OEA’s contract states that teachers work 183 duty days of 7 hours each (6:45 for elem), in exchange for that starting salary of 38.5K.

One frustration is that the question of hours only seems to work in one direction: against us. For example, in any district, teachers missing “professional development” meetings or going over one’s number of sick days will result in negative financial and evaluative consequences. However, going way above and beyond in working hours because you believe it will benefit students is *rarely* paid for or even noted by administrators.

Consider a teacher who coaches a team for an entire season after school and at weekend events — they may get as little as $600 on OUSD. An AP teacher who spend all of the holiday break reading 180 essays gets nothing extra.

Personally, I got into this gig with eyes WIDE open and think it is silly to feel resentment for a system which has been this way for pretty much forever. I am LOVING being a teacher right now, actually, despite my moniker on this site.

However, we need to be clear about what is what. I WAS a “salaried professional” in the corporate sector, once upon a time, and it looked nothing like *this*, lol.