Subscribe to Receive the Daily Report

Tuesday, April 17th, 2018

25-Year-Old Textbooks and Holes in the Ceiling: Inside America’s Public Schools

Author:     Josephine Sedgwick
Source:     The New York Times
Publication Date:     April 16, 2018
 Link: 25-Year-Old Textbooks and Holes in the Ceiling: Inside America’s Public Schools
Stephan:   Here is yet another report on the poverty of American public education. Reading these stories it is very hard not to conclude that American society, at least at the governmental level, has no interest in children or the future of the country since the policies enacted are so obviously dedicated to degrading the education of future generations.  We are creating a future nation of ill-educated peasants.

B

Students at Sunrise Mountain High School in Peoria, Ariz., learn from 25-year-old biology textbooks.
Credit: Frank Eager

Broken laptops, books held together with duct tape, an art teacher who makes watercolors by soaking old markers.

Teacher protests have spread rapidly from West Virginia to Oklahoma, Kentucky and Arizona in recent months. We invited America’s public school educators to show us the conditions that a decade of budget cuts has wrought in their schools.

We heard from 4,200 teachers. Here is a selection of the submissions, condensed and edited for clarity.

Rio Rico, Ariz.
Michelle Gibbar, teacher at Rio Rico High School

Salary: $43,000 for 20 years of experience

Annual out-of-pocket expenses: $500+

I have 148 students this year. The district skipped textbook adoption for the high school English department, leaving us with 10-year-old […]

Read the Full Article

1 Comment

  1. Rev. Dean on Tuesday, April 17, 2018 at 6:54 am

    It is nice to see this article in the New York Times because it is a widely read paper. I am astonished by the lack of funds all over, although where I live it is the opposite: our city council wants to spend money to build a planetarium at our high school, and we are a small city and our resources are low, even though they gouged us for more real estate taxes to spend wildly on things we do not need, and it is literally killing us older folks who do not have much coming in, and it looks like it will be getting worse with Trump the thief in charge of federal spending. Trump looks more like a dictator to me than a president of the USA.
    Aside from all that, these teachers seem to do fairly well salary wise to me. I worked at many jobs over my lifetime, but my best career job was as a computer analyst and I only made a total of $250,000 in all of those jobs combined, and I worked hard in all of them, yet I see these well paid teachers bitching about their poverty. They don’t know what poverty is. I never made much more than $20,000 a year even at my best job, and they are complaining about there salaries. They should walk a mile in my shoes.