For years, decades, the Utah State Legislature has been denying the “starve the beast” attitude towards public education in this state. “Top Priority”, but can’t find the money, gotta keep the rainy-day fund for rainy days and don’t want to foist a tax increase upon the unwilling taxpayers have been their mantras.
In yesterday’s Tribune, House Speaker Becky Lockhart let the cat out of the bag.
In an article about putting iPads (or something technologically similar) in the hands of every student in the state and it’s $300M-$750M price tag, she was quoted as saying:
“Let’s not try to be so focused on the money. If this is the vision we want to have for education, if this is where we know we are headed … then we’ll find the money.”
So, since we can in fact find the money for our vision for public education, then that means that our vision for over 20 years has been “lowest funding in the nation, largest class sizes and lowest pay.” Nice vision.
3 comments:
Yes, they've always found the money for whatever they've wanted.
By the way, it's not just 20 years; it's at least 40.
I was thinking about the late 80's, when Bangerter was Governor and the teachers went on strike over the "take two aspirin and go back to work" comment. That was when the State Education Superintendent of Mississippi came out to thank us for knocking them out of last place.
Yes, but we'd been back and forth between 49 and 50 for years before that.
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