February 2, 2015 - 00:28
At the end of “How to Destroy a Public-School System,” Denvir touches upon the politics of getting funding for schools. The spokesman for Turzai, the Republican majority leader in the State House of Representatives, “explains that Republican members view every dollar earmarked for Philadelphia as a dollar they can’t spend on their own schools. ‘What makes those kids more important that our kids?’”
Considering that schools in Philadelphia are getting significantly less per child than schools in the suburbs, it seems that the answer should be obvious: “those kids” are more important because for years they’ve been considered less important. “Those kids” are losing teachers and nurses and counselors and art programs and anything that isn’t deemed absolutely necessary. "Those kids" need schools for so much more than just education, but they're just barely getting that.
Naturally, this makes me think about why we don’t spend the same amount of money on every child in America, why it’s so difficult for people to see that having a workforce of well-educated individuals would be a good thing. I wonder why we can spend $495.6 billion of our federal budget on defense and one-seventh that on education, why we can always find money for prisons but not schools. Mostly, I wonder why we don’t want “those kids” to succeed.
Source for federal budget: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/browse/collection.action?collectionCode=BUDGET&browsePath=Fiscal+Year+2015&searchPath=Fiscal+Year+2015&leafLevelBrowse=false&isCollapsed=false&isOpen=true&packageid=BUDGET-2015-BUD&ycord=0