Are you trying to explain why you're using "need" to only refer to things with economic benefits? Because that's what I thought was bizarre. There are lots of things we need besides those that can be bought: love, meaning to one's life, agency, creativity, etc.

If you only mean need for the sake of the greater good of the economy, independent of the individual's free choice to determine what he or she needs from life to make it meaningful, then please make yourself clear and say so. Similarly, if by education you mean public, institutionalized, vocational education, then it only makes sense to clarify that as well. Otherwise I don't know how you expect to change the minds of those with a differing viewpoint, never mind those who don't share your ideology.

(As a side note, are you hoping to encourage humanities majors to agree with you? If you call their studies worthless, it's easy for that to sound like a personal insult, which isn't going to convince many people at all! Who are you writing this for, anyway?)

Your ideas about what people need strike me as bizarre.

What was that snide comment for? Here's another confused reader — I doubt I'm unique in that when I worked full-time jobs in tech, I was paid based on an annual salary, no hourly rate whatsoever, no logging hours at the end of the week.

How about incompetent administrators? How do we get rid of those?

As it stands, one incompetent and/or vindictive principal can make life intolerable for dozens of teachers that don't agree with his or her ideas, inspiring many of them to find new jobs within a few years. They would absolutely love to have the standards loosened for firing "bad" teachers to have an excuse to get rid of underlings that disagree with them. In the business world, you'd tell someone with a crappy boss that they should be voting with their feet anyway. But allowing this to happen in schools screws the kids over at said school in the process, compromising the education of the kids whose parents aren't savvy enough to recognize what's going on and pull their kids out (if such a thing is even an option, often not the case as many well-regarded charter or private schools have waiting lists or lotteries, never mind the price or difficulty of transportation). What good does that do the kids?

Unions are there for the teachers because the teachers have nothing to gain by not helping the kids, which keeps the vast majority of them honest, even if there are conflicting ideas about what's best for the kids. That's not the case for administrators, who have a lot of self-interest at stake if they don't like working with people with whom they ideologically disagree (among other possible conflicts).

Yep, they're doing it wrong. The problem is, the education "problem" in the US is almost entirely one of inequality — partially among social classes, but to a greater extent among ethnic groups. But as with all things involving race in America, bringing this up seems to bring out the worst in people of all racial and political stripes.

People state this as if it's obvious, but if you look at the data broken down by, say, ethnicity, you find that the education white Americans get is top-flight compared to other first-world countries, and what blacks and Latinos get is substandard. This is true even when you adjust for income levels.

Intriguing, but bear in mind that teachers are currently paid for the school year at its current length — in California, at least, they're officially paid hourly according to how long they teach, only on school days and a handful of set-aside preparation days; this amount is annualized. We've already got a problem with people leaving the profession or avoiding it because of low pay; making people put in more hours without raises will make you lose many of the most qualified teachers. And of course there's little budget to simply pay more.

Agreed. If you want to look at why, it might be interesting to take a look at administrative salaries and the increasing number of administrative positions. Administrators are largely the ones pushing for increased standardized testing to make their schools and districts look good on paper without particular regard for the quality of education the students get, and they have been increasingly pushing teachers to follow their pet projects to improve their numbers since No Child Left Behind was implemented. Interestingly enough, they are also the people clamoring most for getting rid of "bad teachers".

There sure is a lot of politics, and it's hard to know about all of it as an outsider unless you make it your goal to investigate it. Just consider whose interest it is in to politicize education, and how those interests may have provided deceptive information to those you've gotten your information from.

Just wondering, do you work in education? Usually when people state opinions like this without backing them up with data or research, they have some experience in the field that informs their opinions, and they state that up front. Otherwise it's hard to know why someone ought to adopt your opinions.

I'm no Marxist, but that quote doesn't seem inconsistent with what Marx talked about in the Communist Manifesto.

A lack of understanding of anarchism as well.

Wow... what is wrong with you? This has nothing to do with you being right or not, just how you're going about your argument. You sound like a very angry person, and taking it out on people online isn't going to help you feel better about yourself in the long run. In the meantime you're being rather awful to a bunch of people. Does that make you happy? If so, why?

At least here in California, just about all the teachers that I've met who are active in the union grumble about how reluctant administrators are to fire incompetent teachers. It seems like principals, though, are more often willing to backhandedly try to get rid of someone for political reasons than they are to openly challenge a teacher's competence. The only people that in the current system have the authority to judge whether a teacher is good or not are the school administrators, and there's little to no oversight to ensure that they don't play favorites (not too different from a lot of other jobs, I don't think). Of course, unlike many other jobs, teachers can still be highly effective even if they act completely against their boss's ideology.

Unions aren't interested in making it any more difficult to fire teachers. But you can't really blame them for being supportive of certain aspects of the status quo when they know that if the requirements for termination were more lax, a lot of those pesky pro-union teachers would be the first against the wall, regardless of how good they are at their jobs.

Some of us don't feel it's right to criminalize too many things outright, but have no problem with voting to allow government to raise revenue from activities we find undesirable for our nation... what's wrong with keeping that stuff legal, exactly? Especially if it's more practical to not get ban-happy? You don't have a problem with the notion that we have to make certain activities illegal, even some that are ostensibly victimless, do you?

Is this supposed to be sarcastic...?

Powerful movie stars, rappers, and musicians. Riiight. When people dream of being movie stars, do they desire the power that comes with that position? Or is it that if you care about having actual power you go into, oh, I don't know, business or politics?

One major difference there is that there's no reason to believe Oscar Grant was innocent. He didn't need to be shot, but there was a good reason for him to be arrested.