A few days ago, one of the school monitors went on a trip to a
school near Phoenix with one of the Cholla High sports teams. By the time they
finished their game, the sun had dipped below the horizon, and MOST of the area
that they traveled through on the way back to Tucson was pitch black.
What the monitor and everyone on the bus noticed was that they
had passed several isolated areas that were brightly lit, which the bus driver
used as a teaching tool. The brightly lit areas were correctional facilities,
and Arizona has LOTS of them. Arizona does not have the highest incarceration
rate in America, but it is close to the top, with an incarceration rate of 831
per 100,000. Only 6 states have higher rates, and Louisiana is on top, with a
rate of 1082 per 100,000 population.
In terms of shear numbers, Texas has the
most people in prison or jail (221,800) whereas Arizona had 55,200, roughly the same population as the
city of Flagstaff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_incarceration_and_correctional_supervision_rate
At the end of 2013, America’s prisons and jails held a total
of 2,227,500 people, and the country has the highest incarceration rate in the
world (693 per 100,000 of population) - but that is the rate only for adults. In
addition, America also had 54,148 juveniles in detention.
Arizona has 5 immigrant detention facilities, which very
likely were the facilities that the people on the bus saw, since they were in
Florence or a nearby town.
In addition to the immigration detention facilities, Arizona
also has 48 state prisons, which includes 6 privately operated prisons. 5 of
the 6 privately operated prisons are run by the GEO group, which contributed
$52,000 to help Doug Ducey get elected governor in 2014, a pittance when compared to the $113
million in profits the company made in 2013.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Arizona_state_prisons
And that’s not all.
There are also 5 Federal Correctional institutions in the state,
and 3 of them are in Tucson.
The point that the
driver was attempting to make was that the students had a choice. They could either
take school seriously, or they could slough off and wind up in prison.
In 2011, Arizona spent almost $22,000 on every inmate it its
care.
In contrast, Arizona spends a LOT less on education than most
other states (roughly $8000 per student) . In fact, Utah is the only state that
spends less:
However, spending money is only part of the solution,
since the D.C. school system spends more money per student than anyone, but has some of the
worst results.
The best schools in the country can be found in Maryland, New
Hampshire, Vermont, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. The worst schools are found
in Oklahoma, Idaho, New Mexico, Mississippi, and Nevada. The difference between
all these schools is the amount of money they invest in their students.
The United States spends more money on educating its young
people than any other nation, but the strategy of “throwing money at the
problem” has not produced the results that you would expect. In terms of
knowledge gained, 15 year olds in America ranked 31st on standardized mathematics
tests, and far below average in reading and science.
As recently as 1996, the K-12 school system in America was
ranked the best in the world (due to the establishment of the Department of
Education in 1979), but we are currently rated at #18. Our various states
created Common Core in an attempt to reverse the slide, but we are still far
behind Finland, which is ranked #1.
The reasons for Finland’s excellence (and our decline) can be
found in the article below:
Both our educational system and our prison system need fixing;
simply spending more money isn’t the whole answer. It should be obvious by now
that we spend WAY too much money keeping people locked up, and we need to be a
lot SMARTER about how we spend our education dollars (although Arizona DOES
need to spend a lot more that the state does now.)
The cure to both problems is competent leadership, and it is a
very difficult to find qualified leaders in today’s environment. Diane Douglas
is the Superintendent of Public Instruction in Arizona. Prior to her election,
the only class that she had taught was a stained glass class. Her degree is in
business and marketing.
Betsy DeVos is the current United States Department of Education.
Her college degree is a BA in business economics, and she has never attended
public schools - and neither have her 4 children. Her father-in-law is one of
the founders of the Amway Corporation, and he is worth $5.1 billion, which she
and her husband will eventually inherit.
She is big fan of charter schools, and is a fierce advocate
for school vouchers, which allow students to attend private schools with public
funds. In order to hasten that possibility, her proposed budget for the
Department of Education is $9.2 billion less than the current budget, a
decrease of 13.5%.
Prior to the 2016 election, 98 of the 100 largest newspapers
felt that Donald Trump was not fit to be president, and we are reminded of that
fact on a daily basis. As a result, his Cabinet is the worst in the history of
our country.
As of October 4, Trump had only had a full, permanent Cabinet
for 84 of the 258 days he had been in office at that point. The most recent
departure was his 24 year old drug czar Taylor Weyeneth, who will resign from
his position in the near future, after having been in office less than a month,
Prior to his nomination by Trump, he had had NO relevant work experience since
graduating from college in May 2016, but he HAD worked on Trump’s candidate committee and his transition campaign.
In addition to the Cabinet, a large number of people no longer
work in his administration. “The mooch” only lasted 11 days.
I’m fairly confident that Trump will either be removed from
office or forced to resign at some point
during his first term. However, I’m not sure if that will come after or before
his divorce from Melania (after all, things have been a little Stormy lately).
America has been through some tough times before, and has
survived and prospered, so I am sure that we will recover from our current
mess. All it would take to do that would be for enough voters to “see the light”,
and make the necessary changes.
