Paul LePage and Education

It is nice to know that our Governor knows who the bad guys are. Superintendents, Administrators, and most of all Teachers. These folks who we send our children to each and everyday are the reason education suffers in Maine and elsewhere. If all of these folks would just accept less in terms of wages and benefits everything would be all better.

Did you have a discussion with a child where you asked them what happened when there was something that did not go the way they wanted. They thought about it and could not really come up with an easy answer, so what did they do, they raised there head and pointed at the person who had been with them and blamed them. This is what our Governor and his ilk do. They do not have the foggiest idea of how to make education work better in this state. What they do know however is that the best defense is a good offense. So lets blame these people over here.

Teachers after working ten or fifteen years in Maine might make 40 to 50 thousand a year. Do we really think that is too much, do we really think that this makes them someone to villify in budget battles. Is the argument that I have worked that long at my job and I do not make that much really sufficient? We cannot simultaneously hold up teachers as people to admire, encourage our children in contemplating a career that teaching is an honorable profession, and then continue to begrudge them a salary that no one is getting rich from.

Our Governor is all about the stick. He says if kids need remedial classes in college then we should make their high schools pay the cost. This is a great idea, rather than addressing why school districts are struggling lets set up a punitive measure that will hurt their budget anymore.

Simply put this Governor is a blustering buffoon. There are good people from both sides of the aisle that want the best for our children. First and foremost we should realize that the state is not paying it's constitutionally required amounts toward education, until this duty is kept the idea of begrudging teachers their wages is just window dressing.

Each budget season our schools are laying off teachers and reducing services. What message does this send to our young people? We all know that on a state and federal level we have budget problems that at times seem unfix-able. Cutting education as part of a yearly process, seems to me to make one wonder where it ends.

Every time we allow cuts, vilify teachers, and look for easy answers we are being hypocrites to our spoken value of education. The Governor with his constant demagoguery does nothing but what we have come to expect of him, that is to make a bad situation much, much, worse.