That’s an old line chief maxim from the Air Force, but it describes the ‘oversight solutions’ that are generally offered by ‘management’. People screw up or cheat in one place, so everyone gets a new form to fill out, and nothing is actually done about the people who caused the problem because the managers can’t or don’t want to take the time to actually do their job and supervise people. Everything is classified as a ‘problem with procedures’ not a real personnel problem.

We spend too much time watching insignificant amounts of money, while the big money isn’t monitored at all. The F-22 is still trying to suffocate pilots, but no child who doesn’t meet specific criteria is receiving a free lunch.

With costs going up, student aid disappearing, and salaries in retreat, no one can afford to become a teacher today. You can’t afford the cost of the loans on what a teacher makes, and they keep pushing the requirements higher.

You can’t defraud Medicare of billions and become governor of a state, but give a hungry child a meal, and you’ll never work again. This country has seriously screwed up priorities.

Given that 99% of our students qualified for the free lunch program, we would have been much better off just saying, “Everybody gets a free lunch”, and doing away with that computer system altogether. But if we’d done that, then the Feds would have yanked our lunch money. The demographics / attendance / grades / transcript system was, alas, required for a reason — Louisiana was plagued by “ghost students” who got per-pupil funds but didn’t actually exist before they started tracking all this stuff via computer, some school districts lost 1/4th of their students compared to the previous year once the student tracking system was implemented (!!!!). (The majority of ghost students were students who’d been at a school in the district for at least one day of that school year, but had transferred out during the course of the school year and were properly credited to other districts for ADA purposes, but some were outright fraud). The discipline system was required because of parents involved with “civil rights” groups who kept suing the school districts for being mean to those poor innocent little black boys, everything had to be tracked via computer so that it could be verified that discipline offenses received equal treatment regardless of whether you were white or black, male or female. Thus the whole “Zero Tolerance” thing, which basically was forced onto the schools due to these lawsuits. Then there was the whole special education bureaucracy, when the reality is that for the majority of the students who were marked as “special ed”, they needed pretty much the same thing as the rest of the students — access to better methods of teaching reading and/or arithmetic. (Note that the majority of students who are “special” in today’s schools are *not* retarded or autistic, they are “learning disabled”, a vague notion that basically boils down to “didn’t learn how to read via the same methods used for the rest of his classmates”). But getting them formally designated as “special” via a very expensive assessment process and expensive IEP process was the only way to get the federal funding to give them the help they should have gotten just as a matter of course, if the schools had been adequately funded and staffed in the first place…

I was one of the last echelon of students taught by the stereotypical old lady spinster teachers (why, some of my teachers were as old as 40 years old! 🙂 ), before the women’s right movement got women the right to work at professional jobs beyond nurse and teacher. Schools could pick the best and brightest young women to be teachers back then. Today… not so much. Add in persistent underfunding and you can understand how so many people can be so stupid…

– Badtux the WASF Penguin

We waste so much money regulating schools with administrators and standardized tests, that would be better spent paying for actual teaching.

Down here you make more working day labor, than substitute teaching, but the lottery money is buying e-books [maybe Kindles] for students so the district doesn’t have to buy textbooks. Tell me this makes sense.

They want everyone in a student loan program so the banks will own them for life.

Steve, I went to college when kids from a poor family could get 100% of tuition and books paid for by Pell grants. Nowadays, Pell grant awards for poor kids might buy *one* textbook, nevermind tuition. And since poor kids generally have a sketchy education due to cut after cut at the local school districts that they attend school at, they generally don’t qualify for scholarships.

Republicans are always whining that poor kids should pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Well, it’d help if the Republicans would quit taking away the bookstraps to give tax breaks to the 1%, leaving nothing for the p0or to pull themselves up with…

– Badtux the “Students are screwed” Penguin

Tuition and health care have both risen at multiples above the average cost of living. Anything that benefited the 99% has been slashed to give tax breaks to the 1%.

There are hundreds of stations out there. IIRC, you can even listen to Houston’s Pacifica station, KPFT, online. Not that you’d want to… 🙂

It should at least offer more than 40 songs in one of a half-dozen prepackaged formats, none of which I like.

Since none of the local stations offer news or weather except when there’s a hurricane, I may as well shift. I should at least be able to find some jazz or classical out there, as well as real ‘classic rock’.