January 28, 2015

killing_schools
As the reader knows, Scott Walker had hopped in the GOP clown car and went to Iowa to try out his campaign stump speech on the local yokels.

Part of his speech, Walker was boasting of the deformations that he caused to Wisconsin's education system. He crowed about how he took away seniority from the teachers and allowed school administrations to play favorites on who they kept and who they fired and who got raises and who didn't. To support his skewed sense of history, Walker told a tale regarding Megan Sampson, a Wisconsin teacher who was name teacher of the year the year before he took over but was laid off the next year.

What Walker didn't mention is that Ms Sampson and more than 3,400 other teachers lost their job that first year because Walker had taken a billion dollars out of the education system. Almost every single school district had to lay off teacher, increase class sizes and cut programs due to Walker blowing up their budget.

For the past four years, Wisconsin has seen one school district after another try to find ways to deal with Walker's draconian budget cuts. Many school districts had to hold referendums to raise taxes so that they could keep afloat. Many districts ended up closing schools and consolidating the children into increasingly crowded buildings and classrooms.

The only schools not to suffer were the voucher schools, which received increased budgets from Walker. Walker and his Republican friends in the legislature are so supportive of these privatized schools that they are looking at forcing the public schools to give up their buildings to the education profiteers so that the profiteers can increase their profit margins.

Walker did make up the higher profit margins for the private voucher schools by lowering their accountability and the standards they have to meet. What a guy, that Walker!

As for Walker's claims that they are now hiring the best and brightest teachers, well, we know better than that too. Even as Walker was spreading the pig manure in Iowa, he was pushing a new thing in Wisconsin where teachers don't even have to be teachers. Now people don't have to know how to teach, they just need to know stuff to qualify. More accurately, they just have to know the right people to get a job.

And don't look for any improvements in higher education either. Walker has slashed hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars from the technical colleges and is posed to do the same to the University of Wisconsin system.

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