I stay with the job because I truly care about the kids I teach. It's as simple as that.

marilisa

desert dweller wrote:
I confess, it was me who said that . I stand corrected. However, I contend that my argument still holds water since property values in the inner city have decreased over the years thereby effectively decreasing the property taxes that the owners have to pay. On the other hand property values of the outlying suburbs continue to rise as do their taxes. What is $5,000 on a $100,000 inner city property (if it is valued at that much) when you consider the taxes generated by the multimillion dollar homes in the 'burbs?

So what happens? Less tax money is collected for the innercity school districts and more tax money is collected for the suburban school districts. More money per student is spent in the suburban schools, teachers are paid more, supplies are readily available, conditions are better drawing the most qualified teachers away from the inner city schools leaving those schools in the hands of young recent college grads who don't have tenure or experience anywhere else. This leads to high levels of job burn out both for the new teachers who don't have the fully developed teaching skills as well as for the more experienced teachers who have stayed in the inner city schools and not only have to deal with the problems of their students, but also pull the weight for their greener colleagues.

Pia --
Yes, foreign languages are offered in the public schools, I just don't know if they are offered in all public schools. In fact foreign language study is required curriculum in some schools, as was my case. In order to graduate from high school, I had to have studied at least 2 years of a foreign language. Then again, I went to a well funded suburban school. . My choices of languages to study were Latin, French, German and Spanish.

I read an interesting article the other week in the New York Times that talked about how Arabic, and more specifically, Chinese languages are now being offered across the country in public schools and are in high demand. The classes fill up almost as soon as the course is offered.

Chica: The fallacy of your reasoning is in that the intercity areas are where the commercial real estate is located. I can assure you that commercial real estate is assessed at a much higher rate than residential real estate. Also the tax rate is based on "assessed rate" not "Fair market value."

Just remember "all that glitters is not gold."

Yep, you are absolutely right DD, commercial real estate IS valued higher than residential real estate. I won't argue with you there. So, theoretically cities should have more than enough property tax money to go around and fund the educational system. I have to beg ignorant as far as Arizona is concerned (how big is Phoenix anyway?), but I can tell you about Philadelphia, the fourth or fifth largest city in the country (depends on which list you look at).

Over the years the tax base has been eroding away as employers have moved their offices away from the city into the suburban corporate parks thereby avoiding the high city taxes and attracting employees who are turned off by the thought of paying city wage taxes. It's a win-win for the businesses and a lose-lose for the city. They lose their real estate tax base, they lose their income from the city wage taxes.

In an effort to stem some of the tax losses, the city offers cut rate deals to the big businesses giving them hefty discounts/bonuses when it comes to tax reductions. This has had the effect of luring some of the businesses back to the city, but in no way are they making ends meet when it comes to funding the educational needs of the residents. So, right you are again. All that glitters is not gold.

I understand the difference between assessed value and fair market value. As far as I am aware, each local goverment periodically conducts real estate assessments and assigns those assessments to the properties to ensure that the property taxes being paid are keeping up with the fair market value and vice versa.

I am going to give you a pre-emptive strike. You could argue that Philadelphia is a largely democratic city. Yep. No argument there. However, my counter argument would be that Pennsylvania State was Republican before former Gov. Tom Ridge moved to the beltway and became Director of Homeland Security for a brief stint. One would think that the State would have an interest in seeing its largest city self sufficient.

We could go tit for tat all day around this issue, but at the end of the day what do we have? Hundreds of thousands of woefully educated children who are supposed to be America's future. I really agree with Pia on this point. This is one area where there needs to be equal footing and all children need to have equal opportunities when it comes to education. Something that just isn't happening in the USA.

What is the solution? I really don't know. What I do know is that whatever solution is being applied now (No Child Left Behind Act???) just isn't working.

My parents were teachers (retired) and think the education system is now an absolute shambles and a sham. They think a great number of the programs on the books to alleviate poor school performance are a scam.

They taught school in the early sixties up through the early and mid eighties. My Mom volunteers a few days a week at my daughter's elementary school so she is able to compare "now" to "then"

They remember teaching class with 30+ children. They remember having to use old text books with missing pages. They remember having "rich" and "poor" students in their classes. They remember grading papers at home at night. They remember going to the store to buy a few pens or pencils for some children who didn't have any (for whatever reason). Sounds kind of like today.

They believe the primary reason kids aren't doing as well in school is because the kids don't receive the same academic pushing at home that student's from prior years did. Kids aren't coming to school prepared - homework done, books read.... Also, the kids aren't as well behaved in general and are not able to sit quietly in class and listen to the lessons.

My Mom volunteered in both rural and suburban schools and said the problem is the same in both areas. Rural school problems are increased because the number of Mexican migrant children that don't speak enough english (in a few cases, at all) to keep up with the lessons. So, the teacher must go over the lessons again and again, which means the english speaking elementary school students get impatient and unengaged and start to disrupt the class.

Don't know exactly what it all means. Don't know if it is part of a past trend starting to catch up to itself. I used to believe that we could trust a central gov't to frame and dictate the modus operandi of our society but I think we might be in a period of "be careful what you wish for.." From our sue-happy legal system to our education system, we (Americans) have formed the expectation that someone other than ourselves is responsible for "x" (insert: safety, education, financial welfare, retirement, water and food one day after a hurricane).

In the sixties, the Fed. Gov't said, and thankfully so in some cases, "We can best run the country from a centralized power structure, be it state or federal. We can ensure a good planned economy (stagnation), we can ensure civil rights (kudos..they did that), AND we can take over educating your children. Don't worry, we will take care of everything. Just give us the $$$. We promise we will spend it wisely"

Now, we have the formed expectation that the schools are capable and responsible for teaching our children and for ensuring our children behave during school time without having to continue the schooling at home, after hours.

The other horrible horrible aspect that the U.S.'s particular brand of liberalism brought was "social promotion" in our schools. God, what a horrible disservice to children. To our European friends, social promotion was the practice of sending a student forward from one grade to the next even if they were not performing academically. The theory was that causing a child the embarrasement of not moving to the next grade was more harmful than if the child could not do the academics. So, after four or five years of "social promotion", a 15 or 16 year old child wasn't able to do the work of a 12 or 13 year old. What an absolute disservice that was to children.

By the way, when living in Spain, I was extremely impressed by Spain's public schooling. I can remember a boy living next to me that was doing algebra by the third grade. In the U.S., I didn't even look at an algebra book until the 8th grade.

Chica: To begin with the City of Phoenix is about one million. The entire metro area is about 2.75 million.

You mentioned the program of tax abatement for the purpose of entising business to go into certain area. My question has been at city council meetings and county board of supervisors, "why, if they are not going to carry their weight, do we need them?" When the elected officals do that, they shift the tax burden to the other businesses and residents living in that area. Yours truly had a come to Jesus meeting with city hall a few years ago. Every time you turned around they had another bond election to build this or that. The rational was we have all of this growth and need these things. Well tuff toe nails, if we are haveing all of this growth and need these things for the new residents then put the cost of these improvements into the cost of the building permit. It use to cost about $35 for a building permit several years ago. Now for a 1500 foot house it is about $20,000. Up in Mohave County it is still only about $95.00. Also when property exchanges ownership, an affdavit of value must be filed and the assessor has a chance to make the update then and there.

I will give you a real good example of city that shot itself in the foot. The City of Cincinnati, Ohio in the mid 1970's bent over backwards to get rid of Larry Flint and his Hustler skin rag magazine. Flint finally gave in and relocated to California. Today the Cincinnati down town area is all boarded up, bumbs all over the sidewalk passed out. They were fighting to keep a 150 person telemarketing center with all sorts of tax abatements and entisements. Today Flint Publications has a payroll of 4500 people, 29 publications, most of which are not skin rags. Can you imagine how Cincinnati would be tripping over itself to appease him if he had stayed and put up with their self rightous mentality.

Nevada taxes the property for schools but also has a state gaming tax for schools. Their problem is getting teachers. Clark County school system is short 277 teachers this year. Clark County is Las Vegas. Clark County does not allow prostitution, but Nye County which is next door to Clark does, and they tax that for schools also.

There is no easy solution to the problem of modern education. My only point in getting involved with this dialog with Aidance was "if it is so bad, why stay with it?" Life is to short. You notice that the Desert Dweller did not get into that line of work when he was younger. Your the one that took the job, your the one with the responsiblity. In the game you play the hand you are dealt. If you don't like the way the cards are falling, go to another game.

Wow Chica!

You gave me a lot to chew on and it's certainly not a holiday here. Just another glorious day of being poor, according to excusa, and exploited, according to you , here in the good ol' U.S. of A. And loving every minute of being poor and exploited I might add.

If you were to backtrack about the problem I mentioned about education in the inner-cities, (here I'm not going to whine about being taken out of context or misunderstood or improperly read ) you'll see that I used this example to explain why some taxpayers in the U.S. didn't like giving money to the government to solve problems. The intended issue was not that all inner-city education was deplorable, it was simply that giving more money to the government never solves the problem. That's all. Laduque later in this thread mentioned this as offending her, so I thought I'd give her a real reason to be offended. And as a matter of fact, if you think I'm only complaining about education in the large inner-cities, you are quite wrong. Education everywhere in the U.S. is in shambles. Most likely not all due to teachers, but they are largely responsible for supporting institutions that prevent the problem from being solved.

I was thinking about where to insert this story into this thread, and this is a good a place as any. My wife's cousin, who along with her husband and children are a Filippino family, often bragged about how well their three boys do in school. Of course there's nothing wrong with that. In the boy's room, they had many certificates congratulating them on scholastic achievement. Again, Bravo! Once, why they were visiting me, I asked while all three and their parents were present,a question I didn't think was very challenging, who was the American President who freed all the slaves? Blank look. Then one of them says "Martin Luther King?" Stifling my anger, not my laughter, I ask again, "did you ever hear of Abraham Lincoln?". Blank look. These are not inner-city kids, but educated in a suburb of Virginia Beach.

As far as my rebuttal to your attack on capitalism....yeah, abuses happen under capitalism. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of people are forced to look for other employment, and it must be real misery to have your life so disrupted. But then, under the only other system that us humans can endeavor to organize, when abuses happen, millions of people die, usually by starving to death, all for the good of the masses. My preference will always be with capitalism. As far as people working for "what's in it for me," do you have an alternative? People are free under this system to succeed and to fail. They have no one to blame but themselves for their shortcomings, and I like it that way.

Ask your parents why they didn't hike it to the U.S.S.R. to better their lives, and why did they let themselves be exploited by the U.S. to better themselves. To paraphrase Pia, which I find myself often doing, Filippinos are even more American than I am.

Face it Chica. You have fallen prey to the now very popular, "I want to work to better human kind" mentality. In my world, if you want to help me to your fullest, be the best teacher you can be, the best dressmaker, even the best mother. Make millions of dollars. You couldn't benefit me more than by doing this!!! That will benefit me so much more than thinking that you are nothing more than a sacrificial animal with no needs of your own. Capitalist didn't invent self-interest. They are just realist who play the card game with the hand they are given. Honorable mentions here to Desert Dweller.

¡Olé Gazpacho! ¡Olé! Have you ever considered acting? Your interpretation and then (mis)representing performance of my posts enhanced with your ability to develop and embellish the storyline is outstanding! Not whining here about my posts not being fully read or understood. Although I like to think that I do write with some clarity (could be a misperception on my part).

The example I gave of exploitation was that of workers in third world countries, not in the USA. You conveniently left that out of your rebuttal. Although my father comes from a third world country I never suggested that he was exploited in the USA. My mother is a bonafide 5th or 6th generation American...probably like you...So she didn't come to America looking for her golden egg. She was born here. Neither of them were born into money. They worked hard and modestly succeeded.

I don't whole heartedly disagree with capitalism and if you backtrack and reread my post you will see that I clearly state that captialism is fine when it is practiced with a balanced approach (maybe my utopia??!!).

I agree with you here Gazpacho. But this statement presupposes that the people under this system have all had equal opportunities to succeed and fail. That isn't the case when our educational system is in shambles and children are receiving unequal education based upon their zip code or parents' upbringing. So going back to Pia's original intent, is there any way to level the playing field a bit so that all children can get more or less the same level of education?

I would love to! And as a small business owner, and a capitalist (in moderation) being successful professionally and economically is what I strive for.

Onto education and money. I don't think throwing money at a problem, whether it be through government channels or private channels, is ever effective or a good idea. The educational system overall in the USA is in shambles, both inner-city and the suburbs. It's just that the suburbs have more money and can mask the problem a bit better with better SAT scores, more students going onto college, etc.

I don't think I have fallen prey to any mentality. Like you, I am an independent thinker. I do want to work to better human kind. And as you suggested, the best way to do that is to be the best that I can be. I don't think one is exclusive of the other. I just don't think the latter has to be done by stepping on the former. BTW, my interest is in benefitting human kind, not just Gazpacho!

Congrats to your Filipino second cousins. Their parents have every right to be proud of them. How old are they?

Oh, and incidentally, my parents didn't go to the USSR, but my sister lives there now.

Pia, this is for you... my sister was educated in the US public school system, a private university and also in Germany and Hungary. She speaks 5 languages...3 of them fluently. So while you might come across Americans that have difficulty with languages, not all do. I am damn proud of my little sister!

I love this board!! (No sarcasm in that sentence)

It's like going to an Italian family reunion where everyone yells at each other and then, upon leaving, says how much they miss everyone and wish they could get together more often.