Frazz by Jef Mallett for June 15, 2011

You should never, ever , never tell a liberal that throwing money at education doesn’t work. Since these people don’t understand personal responsibility, do not try to explain parental involvement and responsibility. Do not ask if they allow the TV to be on one or two hours a day. Are there more books than TV channels in the living room?No, it’s the government/teachers/taxpayers fault. By the way, you going to stop wasting money on math and teach my kid self-respect?

Lew, you’re right it is the parent’s fault. And it is also the student’s fault for being born to them. Bad parenting can be overcome, but it costs money. Screw ‘em, eh? Although, what some people call throwing money at “the problem” is just really doing it the right way. It’s cheap to build a highway in Iowa, it’s more expensive in the mountains. Is it worth it? It all depends on if you want roads in the mountains…Is it worth it to spend enough money to solve the problem, or should we just let it fester?

Yup, let’s cut education. That’ll teach us…..

Those who can do, teach; those who can’t write the legislation which keeps us from teaching.

Jef, you’re smarter than this. Frazz is great (the guy and the strip). But you’ve bit the hook that say that if government and the overlord corrupt politicians don’t ‘provide’ us with education (from printed dollars), everyone will just sit and twiddle thumbs, and it won’t happen. The sky will turn green if the govt. does not come to the rescue. But just imagine all those tax savings which local communities and families could put toward creative free-er market education with more choices – without politicians currupting what could be a wonderful process.

So what’s new here? Having spent time in both the corporate and public-ed sectors, I can say that all this “education reform” stuff is just the same voodoo we did in the corporate sector back in the ‘90s: give management more power; come up with magical “metrics” to use against the people who actually do the work; ignore the effect that the raw materials have on the quality of the product (Deming’s famous “red/yellow bead” exercise was completely lost on the managers who paid big bucks to participate in it); and Downsize Your Way To Success!.Worked real well in the tech business. That’s why the once-mighty Bell Labs (ask your parents: Bell Labs was once the world’s greatest private R&D outfit, generating a patent a day and a Nobel Prize—in a real science, not some fluff like Economics or Peace—every few years) is now a tiny sliver of its former self, owned by a French company. But the executives who destroyed it walked away with a lot of money….Watch the same thing happen in education next. Idiocracy, here we come!

Oh, and a postscript: the biggest advantage private (or “charter”) schools have over public schools is that they get to choose which students they’ll accept. (Once again, see Deming and the red/yellow bead exercise.) Public schools have to take every student who shows up, regardless of their ability, interest, or parental support for learning.

Education has often been the victim of the reform of the day but the idea that we can make the system better by eliminating teaching positions takes the cake, Perhaps we can also eliminate crime problems by eliminating spending on police and cut back on fires by eliminating firefighters. You get my drift.

Gee, come to my city and see the waste the school district does with money. See the contracts the union liars and thugs have locked in with the corrupt school board.

Umm, going back to the strip, COACH SPENDS THAT MUCH TIME IN THE BATHROOM? Most joks like him would only read the sports section and the auto ads! What is he eating?!

Oh, boy! A political discussion. This should be filled with logical, well-mannered back and forth between posters.

Honestly, it seems ridiculous to cut education. I’ve been seeing a lot of budget cutting in my own school district, and it isn’t pretty. And our school district is considered one of the best. I’d hate to see what’s going on in worse school districts. In our elementary schools they just cut a reading program for kids who need more help, and that is just horrible. For kids who need help that their teacher doesn’t have time to give them that sort of program is really important. So if that is what cutting educations does, it is so not a good thing

Let’s see — let’s give more money to rich CEOs and give them all tax breaks so they’ll do a better job. And then let’s cut school funding and fire teachers to force them to do a better job. I guess for the rich more money is an incentive, and for the rest of us, less money is.

Connotative, "one-size-fits-all appellations such as "liberals’ or “conservatives” (not to mention, “right wing” & “leftists” etc….should be banned from ANY discussion. They don’t translate. Who is ALWAYS liberal? Who is conservative on each and every topic?So very tired, tiring and tiresome.

Cutting needs to wake them up. Education is big, fat and lazy. Its time for a slim down. I’m in “Frazz’s” home state of Michigan. We have triple the net money to schools over 30 years and have not netted any better results. Instead, its created an organization to employ teachers, administrators and staff. Kids? They’re just passing through.

Not too long ago the metro paper closest to where I live wrote up a private school in a blighted area of the city that was winning awards for educational achievement, after spending less than half per student what the public school system serving that area spends.Somehow the paper’s editorial board managed to argue that fiscal conservatives were somehow at fault for not letting the public schools spend enough to match this private school’s achievement.Sorry, but so long as “improving education” is a one-size-fits-all approach of spending more money, public schools will continue to deteriorate — and sooner or later the taxpaying public will revolt.And with so many states in dire fiscal straits now, “sooner or later” probably means “sooner.”

I never really thought of the Frazz strip as an expose’ of bad public school teachers like Hacker and Olson (and to some extent the principle too). Living outside the US, I have little knowledge of your public school system. In this increasingly internet and information society, why would you pad your country with poor illiterate people? Don’t they drag the elite families (who educate their kids in private schools) down through costs of social programs or street crime? The problem with everyone looking out for themselves is that nobody gives a damn about anyone else. With that outlook, eventually the whole structure collapses (think Roman Empire).

Puddleglum, Deming’s experiment was actually with red & white beads. I watched it. The lesson is still valid. You cannot produce a quality product if you don’t fix the process problem causing it. I’m a victim of public education in the LAUSD and that’s why my wife & I home school. We get triple-taxed because we have to pay state, local and property taxes for public education AND have to buy our own curriculum and supplies. Seeing how well our children do on SAT tests, getting to be such an integral part of their education and ensuring that some knothead is not trying to shove agenda down their throats is worth it all.

lutherg1, I really do have a friend who’s liberal on everything, and will twist logic in whatever way he needs to “prove” that his position is correct. He also really believes that the best way to get our children (Not his, because he never had any.) a good education is to let faceless bureaucrats inside the Beltway impose a One Size Fits Nobody education “policy” on the entire country.

…everyone knows that throwing money at something only works on banks…

Education gives you eyes. It allows you to see and understand the world in ways someone without the eyes of education would not understand or appreciate until they have them. When you’re used to being blind, or ignorant, you may not care about what a big deal it is to see, but once your eyes are opened, you care a great deal. If you refuse, you don’t know what you’re missing. Those who see, know.

No offense Towerwarlock, but you seem to have a problem with everything that’s going on “these days”. Oh well, you’re not the only one. Although modern public schools lack certain things (Such as dodgeball, a fun sport which is banned in many schools), some of the teaching systems are better than the old ones. For example, there are more movies and fun activities, and many classes have reward systems, where the class gets a reward for good behavior.

Richard S. Russell makes the best point. It seems so easy from the outside. Many people would have a hard time with ten kids in their house. How about 30? (A classroom isn’t much bigger than a living room)…Would they also be able to teach algebra?

Creature, thanks for mentioning Dodgeball. It was always my favorite sport in gym class…It should be an Olympic sport. And Coyoty seems to be as wise as the one in Christopher Moore’s novel, Coyote Blue

So apparently when GoComics started running the comics, there was a problem with the archives, dating back to 2011. The comments section picked up from there, and has gotten absurdly pedantic. Attention, people: IT’S A COMIC STRIP! Lighten the #^@% up, willya?

Hey I found the first political argument in the Grazz archives!