Because the right HATES teachers unions and any public worker. Teachers are an easy mark because parents are panicky and reactionary about their kids. Makes it easy to rile them up and manipulate them to their ends. The strong teachers union is something the right despises.
Oklahoma is also doing that. My son who is a Sophomore has a teacher that barely 20, uncertified and dumb as rocks. Our kids stuck in public schools are fucked when it comes to education. We have to teach them ourselves.
It’s what they want. They want a two-tiered education system. They want poor people to be poorly educated and well off people to be well educated so that power remains with “the right” people. That and all education and basically any service to be privatized.
100%
I have found too as a teacher that there are a lot of people who straight up hate teachers specifically. Culturally we pay a lot of lip service to teaching being a respected profession, but we all know how hollow that is.
I get it. Schools are anxiety-factories. Your weaknesses are often put on display and not every student/teacher interaction is supportive.
Now there is this belligerent core of folks who celebrate their ignorance and I see that as a maladaptive coping mechanism to that anxiety that comes from confronting (or being confronted by) one’s own ignorance.
The other side of that is that there are also a lot of (generously) mediocre teachers who have simply continued to stay and “teach” regardless of how many years ago they mentally checked out. They’re toxic, and sour, and that comes through in their lessons, which definitely impacts students who actually want to learn, and who are relying on their teachers to provide the foundational education that’s expected to ensure they have a path to prosperity. Which seems like a steadily dismantled pipedream, for kids who have any awareness of the current state of the world.
The TX Teacher’s Union is a joke anyway. If they strike they lose their licenses.
Arizona has a fast lane for veterans to become teachers.
Why not snail collectors? Or food taste testers? Or veterinary assistants? Or any other job equally unqualified to teach? Yeah, I know it’s because they think veterans are automatically conservatives, but putting veterans through active shooter drills certainly won’t have downsides… /s
A lot of states have a lot of programs for placing veterens in careers when they return from service… I can’t say anything about this one specifically, but in general, I think it’s mostly about the difficulty they have assimilating after coming back.
DeSantis specifically stated that it was to get rid of “woke indoctrination in schools” when he enacted a very similar program in Florida. So, while you are correct that most veteran employment programs used to be about that, the recent teacher one is more about the shitty right wing politics.
There will be an educational divide among red and blue states, with maybe few exceptions. For those of us in red states (fuck yeah, awesome, this is great) we should be very aware of what is being taught to our children.
There already is, and there has been for many years. Students in blue states, on average, perform better on all standardized tests compared to students in red states. I’ve also seen some extremely suspect coursework being reported on these kids’ transcripts, like engineering coursework getting counted as a foreign language, or multiple years of Christian theology “electives” that every student suspiciously takes being given at public schools.
In fact, the real issue is that this has been going on for so long, an entire generation of teachers were taught by these poor red state education systems. Now you have people who take pride in their illiteracy teaching freshmen U.S. history, to the exact effect that you’re imagining.
Edit: Jfc, I just read a student’s essay from Virginia where they’re lamenting the fact their high school didn’t do any literary analysis of books, but instead analyzed Youtube videos and short poems. They’re not even teaching reading anymore. Sure, this student was motivated to go beyond their high school curriculum and focused on learning the classics themselves, but what about the other 446 students in their class?
Yep… They’ve starved the beast long enough that the cycle can now sustain itself.
As someone that grew up in one of the richest counties in his red state, the public schools were well funded with reasonable class sizes. The system continues to be one of the highest ranked in the nation.
They also didn’t allow a JROTC program.
I wonder why it was so important for the county that this be the case, compared to everywhere else in state?
As someone who lives in one of the richest counties in a red state, they’ve already gutted the education system so there is no longer a difference between counties.
That state is Texas.
- The state claimed all our school funding would be solved by introducing a state lottery. It didn’t do a damned thing. Funding is worse than ever. Oh, but lobbyists have started running commercials for casino gambling with the same promise.
- The state confiscates and redistributes school taxes.
- Austin takes in a huge amount of tax revenue, but can’t afford to pay its teachers because the taxes are confiscated and sent to the state.
- The state gives Austin’s tax money to other school districts so they can build water parks and sports stadiums.
- What doesn’t get redistributed gets confiscated and held by the state in a “rainy day” fund that never gets spent.
- Not satisfied with this, the state wants to create a voucher program where tax money will be spent on private schools instead. Those vouchers won’t be spent on teachers or students though. It goes to administrators, and the pockets of investors.
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/03/13/texas-budget-surplus/
https://abc13.com/texas-water-park-school-la-joya-isd-funding/4162905/
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/03/06/valere-public-schools-superintendent-salary-texas
And they consistently mislead voters about the effect of vouchers. If attendance in a public school drops, so does their funding. Period. End of story. Maybe the public school budget will stay the same or even increase but public school funding won’t go anywhere but down.
The math is bullshit. Even if they said, “Schools keep 20% of the original funding,” that’s something like an $8000 loss. Do they save $8000 in transportation, building maintenance, lunches, books, materials, salaries, and extracurriculars because ONE student left?
The one positive thing I have to say about my state is that it hasn’t gone full Texas… Yet.
The divide at that point becomes a class one, where the quality varies intensely by how rich each individual town is.
The pain comes when a struggling town can barely fund its own schools and the assistance coming from the top down to keep the lights on gets cut.
Sounds like Carmel, IN.
