New Tribe Rising?

[BT]

Who ought to be scared are the poor and the black and the sick.  The Mexicans and the illegal immigrants.    I feel sorry for them all if the Tea Parties win the day.

Yes they should be afraid.

[Michael Tee]

THAT'S why I'm better than you.  I feel sorry for them and you don't give a shit.  I really believe that there are more people like me than like you.  That's why your side is going to lose in the end.  We liberals are the good guys and you conservatives are the bad guys.  In the end you will fail because people (normal people) can't live with such greed and selfishness.

[BT]

That's why your side is going to lose in the end.

Yeah your side is doing such a good job with poverty.

You control the education system. You proud of the results?

I think you are more interested in being thought of as being altruistic than you are in results.

[Michael Tee]

<<Yeah your side is doing such a good job with poverty.>>

My side?  Since when has socialism been given a turn at bat?  In Cuba, in Russia, they DID do a good job with poverty.  And when communism "fell" in Russia, so did the standard of living of the people, dramatically.

<<You control the education system. You proud of the results?>>

You talking about the universities?  Excuse me, who runs them, socialists?  Last time I checked the Board of Regents of Any-U, USA, were all businessmen.  Conservative businessmen, too.  The public schools?  Local politicians, trying not to raise taxes, trying not to offend the business community.

<<I think you are more interested in being thought of as being altruistic than you are in results. >>

I AM altruistic, why should I not be thought of as such?  You are NOT altruistic, why should you, of all people, be thought of as altruistic? 

The results?  I know how to get results - - kids have to be taught science and facts, by good teachers earning a good salary and treated with the respect that all professionals deserve.  Not tested for "results" as if brain surgeons or trial lawyers are submitted to such indignities.  They teach and if they go way overboard, there is professional discipline for them, and otherwise you assume that anyone with a teacher certificate is a good teacher.  Not the best but good enough to teach in a public school.  And that should be damn good.

[BT]

You talking about the universities?

No i am speak of k-12 which produces college freshmen half of whom need remedial coursework. Ask XO.

[Michael Tee]

K-12?  More money, better schools, better teachers.  Raise the requirements for the teaching profession.  I went to a High School where every teacher had a Master's degree as a minimum in whatever subject they taught.  The year I graduated, one of my classmates won the Prince of Wales scholarship, the prize for the highest academic average of any Ontario student.  And that wasn't the first time, either.  We got a terrific education, but I can tell you that it cost plenty of money.  We were in a community of fairly well-off business and professional people, mostly Jewish and Scottish in heritage, who valued education highly and were willing to pay top dollar for it, and our high school was a reflection of those values.  There are similar communities today of mostly Asian background and their graduates are today's equivalent of what my school graduated back in the Fifties.  Money is always the answer.  You want better schools?  Pay better for everything. 

In the case of the ghetto schools, you have to look at the community behind the schools, and pour money into early childhood development.  There is a culture of defeatism and anarchism enshrined by centuries of racist persecution that will not be easily overcome, but you can't shrink from the fact that it CAN be overcome.  It costs a lot of money and the greedy white racist society that has profited so much from the enslavement of black people just won't pay back anything without a fight, but that's what liberals are for - - to fight the greedy racist bastards till they cough it all up and pay for their crimes by making good on today's living victims of the racism of their past.

There is no free lunch.

[BT]

K-12?  More money, better schools, better teachers.

Right. That's why parochial schools turn out better students at lower cost.

[Michael Tee]

<<Right. That's why parochial schools turn out better students at lower cost. >>

My old high school beat every parochial school in the Province.  We paid more for our teachers and we got better qualified ones for our money.

This is not rocket science - - if you want better teachers, you pay more money.  If you want better educated, better trained teachers, you pay more money to train and educate them.  Pay higher salaries to attract more people into the profession, and raise the teachers' college standards accordingly to get better qualified applicants if that's where the problem lies.  You can't do this on the cheap. 

The Manhattan Project did not build The Bomb by hiring high-school physics teachers to do the job.  This cheap-ass approach to education by so-called "conservatives" is dumb and self-defeating.  Trillions to kill brownskins, pennies for education?  Fuck dat.  Turn it around - - get the military-industrial complex off the sugar tit and start putting the taxpayers' money to useful work.  And to kick-start the process, tax the fucking rich.  Tax 'em till they bleed.

[BT]

My old high school beat every parochial school in the Province.  We paid more for our teachers and we got better qualified ones for our money.

I'm sure it did. Was your school private or public. What percentage more did your school pay than the surrounding parochial schools?

And doesn't the Canadian government support parochial schools?

[Michael Tee]

My high school was public.  I lived in a village that has since been amalgamated into the City of Toronto, but at the time operated its own school system, consisting of three elementary schools, one junior high school and one high school.

I don't know what percentage more we paid than the parochial schools, but I know it was substantially more.  There were no parochial schools in our village because there were very few Roman Catholics.  Most of the RCC families in our village sent their kids to the public school with us, but some took their kids out in the early grades and sent them to parochial schools in Toronto.  Apparently the RCC kids who went to school with us came from die-hard liberal families because I found out years later that they were under constant pressure, public and private, from their priests and churches to get their kids out of our school and into a good Catholic school in the city.

The Canadian form of government allows the Provinces to create and regulate the operation of  public schools for Roman Catholic students and for non-RCC.  In Quebec, the two systems are called "Protestant" and "Catholic" schools, in Ontario they are called "public" and "separate" schools, but "separate" means RCC only.  No other religion is officially recognized for the purpose of a constituting a public school supported by the general tax revenues of the school district (usually, a city, town, county or in my own experience, a village.)  A few years ago, a strange coalition of Protestant fundies, Jews and Muslims challenged the constitutional basis of this special status of the RCC, and the Supreme Court of Canada backed the status quo on the grounds that it was one of the fundamental conditions upon which the original four Provinces of Canada (at that time, simply four colonies of Great Britain) entered into the new federal state that then became the Dominion of Canada.

[BT]

I don't know what percentage more we paid than the parochial schools, but I know it was substantially more. 

Did you pay tuition or just higher taxes?

[Michael Tee]

Nobody pays tuition for a public high school; we paid substantially higher taxes.

[BT]

Was the village the sole provider of education funds?

And is your high tax rate the reason you were absorbed into Toronto?

[Michael Tee]

I'm not sure how the system worked - - either each municipality funds its own schools, or, more likely, those municipalities which can't fund an adequate school system are eligible to apply for Provincial funding.

The City of Toronto, when I was going to high school, was the biggest one of about 23 municipalities which were later amalgamated with great fanfare into the Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto, a.k.a. "Metro."  They amalgamated, as I understand the theory, because of the sheer waste of maintaining 23 police forces, 23 police chiefs, 234 Fire Departments, 23 Public Library Boards, 23 public school systems, 23 Medical Officers of Health, 23 Chief Coroners, etc., etc., all serving the same contiguous urbanized (or mostly urbanized) area.  "Metro" was organized on the same lines (or similar) as NYC and its "borough" system, and consisted of I think six constituent municipalities - City of Toronto, Borough of North York, Borough of East York, Borough of York, Borough of Scarborough and Borough of Etobicoke. 

Some services were 100% amalgamated into one, such as the police forces (Metro Police) while other services remained fragmented - - Metro Roads were responsible for maintaining major traffic arteries, but each of the Boroughs and the City of Toronto still had their own Public Works Departments, which serviced and maintained the local roads.  There were still individual school systems and tax departments for the 5 boroughs and the City of Toronto.  There were six City Halls (instead of 23) and one big new Metro Hall.  Later still they scrapped the "borough system" and everything not amalgamated in the first amalgamation became amalgamated into the City of Toronto in the second amalgamation.  Now there's no more Metro and no more North York, etc. but just one big City of Toronto.

The primary motive for each amalgamation as I could see it was the elimination of wasteful duplication of effort.  The village I grew up in was absorbed into the City of Toronto, so it lost its unique school system, garbage collection etc. but for years managed to piss off the rest of the City by having its garbage picked up the old way - - twice weekly at the side of the house instead of once weekly at the curb like everyone else.  No one was ever able to provide a satisfactory explanation why this should be the case, but this was where the Big Money and the Old Families resided and the situation continued till a few years ago when a "left-wing" City Council finally ended the practice.

[Michael Tee]

I might have gotten some of the sequences wrong in the last post I made, it's either as I stated or else that 23 municipalities were amalgamated to the City of Toronto while the five Boroughs remained outside the City and later amalgamated.

Either way, the motives for the amalgamations were primarily to eliminate wasteful duplication of effort.