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Lawmaker Opposes Education Funding Because It Would Go To ‘Blacks’ Who Get ‘Welfare Crazy Checks’

http://thinkprogress.org/election/2015/0...e-crazy-checks/
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A Mississippi state lawmaker said he opposed putting more money into elementary schools because he came from a town where “all the blacks are getting food stamps and what I call ‘welfare crazy checks.’ They don’t work.”
In an interview with the Clarion-Ledger regarding education funding, state Rep. Gene Alday (R) stated his opposition to a push to increase funding to improve elementary school reading scores. Alday implied that increasing education funding for children in black families would be pointless.
Alday continued, saying that when he was mayor of Walls, MS, that the times he’d gone to the emergency room had taken a long time. “I laid in there for hours because they (blacks) were in there being treated for gunshots,” he told the newspaper.
At issue is something called Mississippi’s “third grade reading gate,” a measure passed in 2013, which won’t allow students to advance to fourth grade if they can’t read proficiently. A survey of Mississippi’s school superintendents estimated that about 28 percent of the state’s third graders would have to repeat a grade because they couldn’t pass the reading proficiency exams.
The idea for the policy came from Florida, where the state invested about $1 billion into schools to pay for reading coaches, teachers and increased attention to students who struggled with reading.
The Mississippi legislature recently advanced a bill that would provide exceptions to the reading policy for students with learning disabilities. The bill is opposed by Gov. Phil Bryant (R), who supports the third grade gate policy.
“It’s disappointing that 62 members of the House of Representatives would vote to socially promote children who cannot read,” Bryant told the Clarion-Ledger. “With votes like this, it is little wonder that Mississippi’s public education system has been an abysmal failure.”
Bryant’s critics suggest that he needs to change his approach. “If the governor is sincere about making universal literacy a gateway, rather than a gatekeeper, he would support full funding for what it will take to get the literacy job done,” said Mike Sayer, co-founder of Southern Echo, a grassroots civil rights group that works with African-American students.
Alday staunchly opposes increasing the funding. “I don’t see any schools hurting,” he said.

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I tried to stop making threads about it guys, but this being on the front page of yahoo, i couldn't be quiet about it.

I was thinking since it was a thinkprogress article, maybe some of it wasn't true...so i did some searching.

I guess I shouldn't have, cause it pissed me off even more.

http://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2015/02/14/miss-third-grade-gate-fear-failure/23443737/

^^
this article is about the state of Mississippi and their education funding. which surprisingly...low.

here's a piece from that article:

In 1997, state lawmakers passed the Mississippi Adequate Education Program, creating a funding formula to improve education of all students by making sure schools would have adequate resources.

Despite that, it’s only been fully funded twice — in 2003 and 2007, which happened to be election years.

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The fact that these people see no correlation with education and success, combined with the fact that this guy thinks funding education is a joke because it will go to lazy blacks is the reason why minorities always bring up Race.

because there are law makers who don't believe in us. who actually make decisions.

this is a republican ran state by the way. I always find it funny how racist seem to mostly be republican.

and yet i can bet money, somebody on this board is going to try and flip the excuses and say it nots not racism.

I also find it funny how racist and republicans(yes, often going hand and hand, lets be real) seem to be the most beneficiaries in republican ran states, such as food stamps, as the example below illustrates.

http://aattp.org/ts-official-white-folks...in-the-country/

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So, for all you posters with the inevitable "stop playing the race card" post that i'm sure will come, I'll go ahead and respond with "then tell your own people to stop pulling the race card as well, and actually fund education in poor communities"

bye.

I guess he spends a lot of time in the emergency rooms to formulate the opinion that ERs are always busy patching up blacks shot with guns.

It's easy to target the schools.

On the other hand maybe that money and effort COULD be better spent improving conditions for those living in poverty so focusing on learning would be easier.

I bet it would also prove to lessen the amount of gun shot blacks in the ER too.

My bet is he wants to use the money for tax breaks.

A complex funding problem exists in education. Certain districts receive more in per pupil funding due to the value of the homes in that area. This creates an inherent separate and totally unequal playing field for all students across all socioeconomic backgrounds. The other issue with funding is the money used focuses on idiotic programs. These programs mainly focus on getting test scores up for a student to make a school district look better. Meaningful learning does not happen through a standardized test. Meaningful learning occurs through projects which require a student to use all learning modalities!

There's another issue in education about disregarding the local cultural background of the community. That's a topic for another time.

As someone who has unfortunately lived in Mississippi in the past, I can say it can be a very sad place to live. I would also say most of you have no idea what it's like down there at all. It is not a culture you would ever comprehend or be used to because in most of the state it is very similar to living in a third world country or worse.

There are pockets of good places to live like Hattiesburg or the coastal cities along I-10 but don't get off the main drags or you might be in trouble. In these areas the adults, much less, their kids have zero use for an education. Why? It's because even if they had an education there are no jobs. I mean none at all for miles and miles. That's even if they had a working car to get to the job if it was there. You will never see so many barely working 30 year old cars as you will in Mississippi.

I take offense to him thinking its only the blacks though. It's EVERYONE. It's a state of where there is a perpetual culture of poverty. White or black if you live off the beaten pass your poor, very poor. There are no job and no hope of jobs. You will never save up enough money to move away and get out either.

There are also 3 main gang cultures the Bloods, Crypts, and the G's. These three gangs are all black and bully and fight to make almost every single black person a part of them. I had black friends who were constantly being harassed to join one and pick a side and that was in one of the NICER cities of Pascagoula. Even in Pascagoula though, there are large areas you don't go into if you're white. You definitely don't go there in a patrol car unless you're bringing the entire police force.

I made the mistake of venturing into something the locals called Carver village(the area I just mentioned) on my way home walking from the only library in town(a very good one though). Literally about 40-50 angry black men started streaming into the street. I was F*****! Then out of no where a crazy old black lady came and grabbed my elbow and started acting like I was there as her husband. She asked me if I wanted to go for a walk and I hurriedly said, "Anywhere is fine Mam." with a worried smile and expression on my panicked face. As, she started to guide me to the end of the street the men started to spit and file back into their bar.

According to my black friend who lived in that area I am probably the only white boy to make it through that area on foot in possibly 20 plus years without ending up in the hospital or worse. That old lady was completely nuts but no one messed with her because she was the grandmother of the main gang leader in that area. The only thing that saved me was her taking hold of my elbow. I am always so very grateful when I think of her. I believe God was watching over me.

The thing is, I don't agree with the senator because I work in education and I know more money almost always helps fix things or at least improves them. In his case though he may be right. There are somethings in Mississippi you just can't help or fix by adding more money to the schools because the only reason anyone is in those schools is to avoid going to jail for not showing up and so mama can get her ebt card and foodstamps.

When you have no hope of a productive future or life and no hope of a way out then you just don't care about going to school or about grades. Mississippi is the closest you will ever see of a living example of communism/pure socialism at work. Large areas of the state survive on just welfare and nothing else and will never have anything more than that because they have learned to live on ONLY that.

Most of you have no way of ever understanding because you at least had some form of hope your entire life. The areas Gene Aldray is talking about haven't had hope of anything but a welfare check in a long, long time.

So why don't they fix that?

posters on this very board have said that blacks can always find a way out.

yet from your experience, which I believe you because you lived that life, then there is pretty much no way out.

why aren't the politicians trying to fix that? that type of life in America is simply unacceptable.

I know all too well what those gangs are about. and very few make it out alive from those gangs.

More money doesn't, in itself, fix ANY thing. What the school does with that money - but more importantly what the students decide - that fixes things.


The students attitudes are based on family life. Family values (i.e. education is important).

Fix family life - fix the neighborhood, fix the expectations.........bam, you're way over half way to fixing the problem.

You can't fix anything without jobs. The kind of jobs these people could do are all in mexico now. It would take a group of businesses setting up jobs as a charity to make anything happen and why would they? Most of the people there wouldn't do them anyways because they are fine with living on welfare. They will do some undertable jobs for the farmers here and there to get money for booze but that is about it. I am not referring to only blacks either. There is an entire culture built like this.

There are more blacks like that though and I suspect it goes all the way back to slavery. They have just changed their owner from a white plantation owner to uncle sam. It angers me every time I think about it but I have no idea how you help cities of people who will never help themselves. I am not saying EVERYONE is like that mind you but there is a very large majority of it like that.

It sounds as if someone should have spent more on his education ....... it sure seems like he could use it.

That said, I firmly believe that we will not fix education without fixing families. Too many broken families lead to too little parental supervision, and too many kids doing everything except studying. This isn't a Black/White thing, but a broken family thing.

There are tons of options to correct this, but no one does because of the cost. Everyone just wants to say "charter schools" and pretend like the problem is fixed.

And this will sound extremely communist, but maybe we should raise taxes and start serving kids free meals. Like real meals, not the things we are currently serving them. Going to be hard for a child to study when they're experiencing hunger pains in class.

What causes broken families? It would help if we got to the root of the problem.

Every aspect of our lives are based on economics. Black, white, green or purple.

There are a ton of factors, from societal pressures, to education, to economic and employment opportunities, to modern morality.

What do you see as the root cause(s)?

It is not just saying "charter schools". Charter schools hold the students and faculty more accountable for results. Parental involvement is typically higher in a charter school because the parent has to take action usually to get their child into the school. It is not a catch phrase. It is what the term represents.

Part of the problem with educational standards is the fact that very little is required of parents to get their students into school and very little accountability is being placed on the teachers and administrators. Teachers have a difficult time teaching a 5th grader long division when the child is unable to read and has discipline problems. Parents have a difficult time teaching their children basic social skills at home while their children learn basic socialization through other media outlets.

Holding parents, students, and educators accountable is the only solution to the educational problems facing America.

Exactly though. You're working with a sample size like none of the other samples. Charter schools are not the actual answer, because their success requires parents to already be extremely active in their children's life (at least enough to get them into a charter school).

There are a lot of ways you can tackle schooling. I think getting rid of homework for children who are not in high school is a great idea. France proposed a school system change that would eliminate homework, but keep the students a few hours longer so they would have time to do their work, in their school, surrounded by teachers.

In general it's extremely hard to compare the U.S. with European countries based on demographic changes, relative size, and cultural differences, but Finland has such an amazing teacher selection service where only the top 10% in a graduating field can become teachers. I'm sick and tired of seeing so many of my peers go into teaching because they have nothing better to do. It gives a horrible name to teaching, but it'll have a bigger impact on the kids they will try to teach.

But you are correct, holding parents, students and educators accountable is the only real solution. The question is how do we get there and how do we judge students/teachers? I find standardized exams completely and utterly foolish as teachers will just teach to the exam. That would defeat the purpose of an exam then. There was an interesting thing I read the other day about using projects instead of exams. I'll try to dig it out later, but I'm only up right now because my housemate's a loud *************** (<-- that's not an actual word, but pretend that's in caps and i'm screaming it, because that's what I'd like to do to him.) and I'm going back to bed now that he's left.

This guy seems like a grade A moron... and this is probably why Mississippi ranks last or near last in almost every measurable statistic that is kept to measure success of a state academically, economically, etc.

I feel sad for him, I feel sad for those who thought voting for him was a good idea, I feel sad for all of the people that have to live with the legislation that comes from a guy like this....

Education is the means by which things can improve. I'd think that equating Welfare with School funding is a reach.

I think that is exactly the point I was trying to make. You will not have success with those students who do not apply themselves or parents who are absent when it comes to their children. Do not hold students and parents back by making them try to succeed in a system built to have everyone succeed by not holding the parents, students, teachers, and administrators accountable and accepting less than excellence.

I know not all children will excel. All too often we lose the potential Twain, Rockefeller, Jobs... etc due to mediocrity in school standards. As for your French school example, I feel more choice is what the USA was built upon. Stop the watering down of schools by including everything within them from English as a second language to community activism.

A child entering the public school system should have grade level equivalent understanding of the English language. If they are unable to read, write and comprehend the English language, they are already far behind their peers and on the road to failure. Not to mention the time and effort by the schools to get the students to a minimum understanding of content materials being taken away with language teaching.

You have two kinds of poor. Poor with Hope and poor with no hope.

The thing that gives hope is the ability to make a decent living. A JOB.

You can talk all you want but at the end of the day if there are no jobs and people have no hope of one then they won't care about anything other than basic survival. They won't care about education because to them its a worthless commodity that is a waste of their time and effort. They don't need an education to sit on the front porch collecting welfare.

The only thing that begins a change in culture is an influx of jobs by employers willing to train and build up the community.

Until you have JOBS nothing else matters to the poor because they don't have any hope to try for anything better.

The only other way to change those kids is to remove them from their parents and put them in a boarding school as a sort of prison where they can't leave and are forced to spend their entire day learning whether they want to or not. Thier parents are never going to make them. Children can't learn until you provide them safety, food, good health, and emotional support. Until you're meet those 4 requirements children won't learn very well if at all.

Can't have jobs if companies are moving them to India, Pakistan, China and japan.

You won't get the tax revenue from Large corporations until they can no longer set their Corporate HQ in Ireland rather than in the US. (see GE and Eaton as examples of this)

I agree Daman. When business owners have no care towards the people of their country except as ants to give them money and profit then they will never care about their community enough to have a positive impact. To be honest I think the cooperation structure in general is bad for America in the long term because they ONLY care about profits they have to report to the shareholders and not the community other than what they pay out to have a positive public image. Even if you eliminated corporate taxes altogether the cost of labor is so different that I think they would still flee america. It doesn't help when you have a president that encourages businesses to leave so that OTHER countries will become wealthier as him major idea of improving the US.

Poverty and insecurity I think are the biggest issues. We've talked about this a ton through PMs

Voleur....where to start.....

Charters, on average, do no better than regular schools. The ones that do well have skewed demographics; the schools are homogenous. Barely any minority students or those on IEPs attend the well performing schools. Look into research by Diane Ravitch on this topic.

In regards to "accountability". People want to measure teachers on data. This data information comes from standardized "bubble in this answer to show how smart you are" type tests. What intelligence is this actually measuring? Is this measuring basic skills or are we measuring what matters? Obviously the answer is "measuring basic mundane rote memorization skills".

Meaningful learning comes from having student produce projects that require the use of all the intelligences a person possesses. Teachers need to use multiple modalities in order to reach all learners of all types. You can judge this, but it does take a dedicated individual to sit and observe a teacher for evidence of this.

The "accountability"wing is driven by Pearson who makes a ridiculous amount of money from the kids taking all their tests. They care about the $$$ and not about student learning.

-Average teacher salary in 1950-51 was $4,000; today’s starting teacher salary is $39,000

-In 1950, 36 percent of white Americans and 13 percent of black Americans over 25 years old had a high school diploma or higher. In 2010, 92 percent of white Americans and almost 85 percent of black Americans earned a high school diploma or higher.

-Students attended school an average 155 days in 1950-51, while today’s students attend an average of 180 days

-$215 was spent per student in 1951 while an average $10,615 was spent per student in 2010

-The best selling books in the 1950s were Charlotte’s Web and The Catcher in the Rye while today’s best selling books are The Hunger Games Series and The Invention of Hugo Cabret

-Each year 1.3 million students drop out of school

-Currently, U.S. students are ranked 14th in literacy and 25th in math

www.lireo.com/americas-schools-1950s-vs-today-infographi

1912 eighth grade exam:
1. Write these two numbers in words: .000003, 653.0965

2. A man bought a farm for $2,400 and sold it for $2,700. What percent did he gain?

3. A school enrolled 120 pupils and the number of boys was two-thirds of the number of girls. How many of each sex were enrolled?

4. How many parts of speech are there?

A question for the group at large...

According to this article that I read during my hiatus, Webpage middle class black kids have a much higher rate of falling back into poverty than do white kids.

Why is that? The theory is that once you get out, you are supposed to stay out, and grow from there. So why are black kids who live in better neighborhoods, go to better schools, have better family structure, falling back into poverty? It makes no sense to me.

Secondly, the article states that the gap between income of white families and black families has grown to its widest margin since 1989. So obviously whatever we are doing, isn't working. (I have to admit, I don't know if that includes ALL white families and ALL black families or some middle class subset)... I'm a big believer in personal accountability and it's very hard to motivate somebody to succeed who has no hope and who has no role models who show him/her what it means to be successful.... but what, as a community, do we need to do different? More/different government programs? Less government programs? Dump more money into education for kids who may or may not take advantage of it? Bus kids to different schools for more integration?

I'm a self-professed conservative, I'm willing to spend some tax money to improve the outcome but it appears we are getting a pretty crappy return on our investment to date. Thoughts?

I'll take a crack at that DC.

Some of it is because of perceived ambitions and stereotypes.

in spring of 2004, both my parents finally found really good jobs, and the first thing they did was inform me that I will be going to a private school. I started Fall 2004, my junior year, just turned 16.

the school is 99 percent white, and you know what the first thing those kids asked me?

"are you here to play football or basketball?"

I'll leave that part at that, as far as stereotypes. It didn't offend me, but it enlightened me on how kids, who also probably get their opinion from their parents, viewed black kids.

It doesn't help either, that a lot of us growing up didn't want to be doctor's, lawyers, polic officers or any of that.

We wanted to be rappers, athletes, open our own recording studio, etc. so yea, we lived up to our own stereotypes.

A lot of it has to do with being fed this idea in our own community that we won't make it any other way. Those careers I just listed? it wasn't for us. we don't have the education or money to make it to those kind of professions. the teachers in the Cleveland Municipal School District treated us that way, as well.

I remember walking by the administration office in my school(JFK high), and this Mom was there yelling at the people wondering why her son missed 20 days of school and nobody called to inform her that he was skipping.

I also noticed a huge difference in how the police treated hood, public school kids and private school kids.

They call it Truancy.

It was an art form if we tried to skip class in the private school I went to. Straight up ninja operations because the cops were absolutely on it.

The cops at the public schools would joke with us while we walk right on by them skipping class in JFK. They didn't care.

We don't need to integrate more kids to different schools because that won't solve anything. We just need to hold teachers and public school more accountable.

When i went to that private school, I was such an outsider those final 2 years. I had friends, but I never was REALLY part of a tight circle. I didn't get invited anywhere too much, and I found out after I graduated from some friends that because they assumed I didn't have any money to do what they were going to do(It was an accurate assumption, I didn't)

it's complicated, but pretty much, it seems like blacks in general either go to high profile sports or musicians, or end up as some hourly customer service rep. it sucks. We seem to have this "go big or go home" mentality when it comes to success, like there's no middle ground.

Salon.com is a horrible resource to use. The article makes an assertion without any evidence or even pretend to have any evidence. The author just states it as a fact and has no basis for it.


Again I have found no basis for this statement. A charter school is a public school created by the state for a focused purpose. The school is chartered to accomplish a goal. That is why it is a charter school.



I partially agree with you. Not on rote memorization because rote memorization has a purpose in education. But how to measure teacher success. When you have a charter school, you have a real measuring tool to assess the staff. The charter of the school itself.



Again I agree partially with you. Not all students are as intelligent as the norm. Some are deviations above and below the norm. Anyone who bases their evaluations on the -2,-1,+1,+2 deviation off the norm is misguided at best. We should not allow the least and most gifted students to blur our vision of the education system as a whole. I feel the charter school system is a much more accurate reflection of the student body as a whole than the current education system.

Anyone understand how difficult it is for children to learn when they are beaten, neglected, sexually abused, hungry, cold, frightened and alone?

I could sit here for hours and share stories of children who fit all of the above circumstances. Anyone think little Susie coming to kindergarten cares what sound letter A makes when Uncle Jim crawled in bed with her last night (and will do it tonight) and did unthinkable things to her.

Until Maslow's heirarchy of basic needs are satisfied in the home BY THE PARENTS, this problem will persist. It is ages old.

Providing free food, breakfast and weekend meals are not appropriate measures. Some parents take the weekend food and trade for other "goodies". Just does not work......parents need to be parents. We cannot legislate parenting, so we blame the rest of society. It's the easy way out!

So in short, fixes represened by this thread are only a band aid til parents step up and become parents!

That's why instead of just pumping money into public schools you create public boarding schools and get those kids out of the environment that is stopping them from learning. Then you make them mandatory if the children are failing at a regular school. IMHO its the only way to save a lost generation from horrible and incompetent parents.

as a kid growing up in a troubled community, i actually agree with you Razor.

i think i much rather be a adult being completely socially awkward, but intelligent and worth something to society, than being a statistic and the butt of jokes of government assistance.

You and others like you are gonna be the 'Moses's' that people can learn from and follow out of their mental bondage.

Keep going!

I'm trying bro. right now i'm taking cues from guys like you, DC, CHS, PDR, 40, Arch, Razor, YTown, the ladies of Dawgtalkers, countless others, and even Anarch and making sure that my views on society don't even up being hypocritical.

big learning process.

Here here. Well said Mr. Ted!

You do know that $4000 in 1950 is $39,800 today.....



Which is $2140 today.

Another way of combining the two above facts is that a teacher who taught a class with 30 students was paid 62% of the total students' education cost in 1950, but today is paid only 12% of the total students' education cost today....

You DO realize you are comparing "average teachers salary to starting teacher's salary, right?

That's the problem with averages. Doesn't mean a whole lot. I can only speak for the school district I live in. Avg. starting salary is $30,000, and it goes up rapidly from there.

Avg teacher salary across the district? About $50,000, with many being close to $60,000.

I really screwed up not going into education. The money isn't great - but it's damn good. Here. And the benefits are more than fantastic. Put in 30 years doing what you supposedly love, get a pension (damn good pension) and health care (not 100%), for the rest of your life?

I wish I would've signed up.

Well, I didn't major in reading comprehension....

Though that doesn't explain the second point, which is that teacher's make a lot less of the educational pie than they used to.

J/c

Charter schools are not the answer, especially when some charter schools are for profit. Anything for profit are motivated by the companies bottom line. So how can anyone think charter schools are a good thing when the fundamental assumption is that the charter school is trying to make money?

How do you make money at a charter school? Provide the least services possible, provide the cheapest food possible, provide the least trained teachers possible.

Actually, teachers pay for their own health care upon retirement just like everyone else. The idea that health care is paid for life is untrue.

But to Lyuokdea point, you can't compare schooling in the 1950s to now. Life was so much simpler, easier, and less expensive back then so making $40k back in 50s allowed you to do many things that are impossible to do if you are making 40k now.

I know several teachers, all have their masters from an accredited school which takes intelligence, time, effort and money to achieve. If teachers are not making 50k-60k, how do you expect them pay off their school debt? I am not sure if you know but you must have a degree in order to become a teacher. In the 1950s was it required to have a bachelors(with specific accreditations) in order to teach? I am going to assume no.

As for as your decision not go into teaching sounds like a shot at teachers. To make the 50-60k it takes 15+ years of being a teacher. What field do you work in? Does it require you to have and advance degree? If your field requires a degree, don't you think you should be compensated a fair amount that will allow you to provide for your family?

Yes I was aware, I posted without comment because I found it interesting. What really impressed me was this...

-In 1950, 36 percent of white Americans and 13 percent of black Americans over 25 years old had a high school diploma or higher.
In 2010, 92 percent of white Americans and almost 85 percent of black Americans earned a high school diploma or higher.

Thanks for the response. One thing you said, really hit home for me..


I have also found this to be true. 5 or 6 years ago I went to the National Minority Contractors Association national convention. I was invited by the Diversity Coordinator at Wake Forest University because they were trying to get firms like mine to partner with minority firms to do business with colleges and universities.

I discussed this with my buddy after, everybody there had such low expectations. They just wanted their little janitorial company or their little carpentry business to get just a small sliver of the pie. They were at the beck and call of the larger contractors and wanted the scraps. None of them wanted to BE the bigger contractor. It's like these, mostly older black men, had been beaten into submission and felt that was the best they could do. The dream they had when they were younger of growing a business into something huge was killed, now they were in "just enough to get by" mode. It was fairly depressing.

But from the article, I think the point I took away from it was that I, as a white dude, seem to think that if a black kid comes from a middle class family, there is no reason that kid needs any more attention, his parents have already pulled him out of where ever they started. And that's not the case. It's like 2 steps forward and 1 step back.