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Republican education “reformers” always state that if we got rid of our bad teachers all of our students could wear the Lake Wobegon logo of “above average.” Thus, we should get rid of tenure laws, seniority policies, salary schedules based on degree levels, and institute merit pay systems for the “best” teachers. All teachers should be evaluated on the progress of their students regardless of economic status, life experiences, and family structures and backgrounds.
Although Minnesota ranks among the top five states in child well-being surveys, a new report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Children’s Defense Fund in the annual Kids Count report states that child poverty in Gopher country is creating racial disparities among the worst in the nation. Over 15% 0f Minnesota children live in poverty. But our minorities seriously wallow in poverty: Black children, 50%; Latinos, 38%, and Asians, 20%. Another major factor in child well-being is overall health. Minnesota is slipping rapidly. In 2012 we ranked seventh. In 2014 we slipped to 17th. Several states have implemented preschool programs for all students. We only have less than half of our three and four-year-olds enrolled in preschool programs

The United States Has More Poor Children Than Any Other Developed Country

We have 16.1 million poor children–and 7.1 million extremely poor, for a total of 23.2 million. We have five million poor infants and toddlers and 12% of that total are extremely poor. Nearly 60% of all of our children and more than 80% of our Black children and 75% of our Latino children perform below fourth and eighth grade academic levels.  Over 1.1 million of the 2012 high school class dropped out before graduating. We rank 22nd among developed countries in high school dropouts and graduation rates.  Children in families in the bottom 20% of incomes drop out at a rate five times that of students who are in the top 20% of family incomes.
Perhaps this statistic will alarm those Cheney-McCain neocons who are always eager to get us into the next war to save the One Percent: At the present time more than 75% of our 17-24 age group cannot pass military tests or entrance criteria to even get into the military. The reasons? Poor literacy, health, or prison time.
Even with this information at their disposal, Republican right-wing “reformers” such as Michelle Rhee, Minnesota Representative John Kline, and even Billionaire Bill Gates say getting rid of bad teachers will solve all of our problems in education, that replacing bad teachers with good teachers will immediately wipe out other societal “excuses” such as lack of educational support money and the poverty and health of students and families.

For A Moment Let’s Compare The Professions Of Medicine And Education

Most One Percenters have a lifespan of between 95 and 103 today. But on average life expectancy we rank 37th in the world. Japan tops female life expectancy at 87 while we are at 81. Iceland tops male life expectancy at 81.2 compared to our 76. In our poorest counties where we have extreme poverty, males have a life expectancy of 64 and females 73. Life expectancy is the most important marker of a society’s health.  
Why should a One Percenter who makes over $10 million a year live 30 years longer than a 99 Percent coal miner in West Virginia?  Republicans often say that money or the lack of it does not influence the quality of education in our schools across the country. Only the quality of teachers makes a real difference. No other qualities of life matter, particularly money. Bad teachers produce terrible results in the classroom. It would seem to me that the same condition should exist in healthcare. If the coal miner in West Virginia dies 30 years before the One Percent hedge fund manager he was born with on the same day, then it must be a bad doctor who did him in at 64. It certainly couldn’t be poverty. It certainly couldn’t be his living environment. It certainly couldn’t be his diet. It certainly couldn’t be stress. Why, a good doctor should be able to add 30 years to his life span. Or have I missed something?
Or maybe Wright Patman, a longtime dead Texas Democrat, had it right when he made this political and religious statement: “One of the first duties of government is to protect the weak against the strong, to prevent men from injuring one another. We know that many, but not all, of our most powerful and influential citizens are very greedy. It is perfectly natural that they seek power, influence, and greater wealth. It is also true that where there is greed, there is no vision, and the Good Book says that where there is no vision, the people perish.”

Why Are The Poor The Most Charitable People In Reagan’s “Shining City On A Hill?”

The New York City school system has been sponsoring food drives among all of its schools for about 15 years.  One might expect that the schools in the wealthiest parts of the city would lead the food drives in quantity and quality. Not so. Consistently over the years the 18 most generous schools are 18 of the poorest schools in the entire city. The director of the New York City Harvest Food Bank, largest food bank in the country, has finally figured it out: “In neighborhoods where poverty is the greatest, people are most aware of hunger.”
In Englewood, New Jersey, one of the richest suburban communities around New York City, it is evident the citizens have a different attitude about charity and food drives. When it was discovered that at least a hundred families were dumpster-diving and  eating straight out of the numerous dumpsters and trash cans surrounding gourmet restaurants, the local newspaper fired away at the hungry: “This is a state of affairs that any red-blooded citizen will want to put a stop to, even if it costs him his bottom dollar. The necessary amount must be raised immediately to build a waste incinerator that will put an end to these revolting practices.”
According to the National Foundation to End Senior Hunger over eight percent of Minnesotans over 60 face the threat of hunger. That’s the second lowest rate in the country. But over half of food-insecure seniors are more likely to have diabetes, twice as likely to report poor health, three times more likely to suffer from depression, 14% more likely to have high blood pressure, nearly 60 percent more likely to have congestive heart failure or a heart attack, and twice as likely to have gum disease or asthma.

Three Billionaire Reformers Who Know Nothing About Education

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation have spent billions trying to bend educational policies to fit their idea of functional-and dynamic-schools. According to Joanne Barkan of Dissent magazine and many other sources, their educational program is a market-based educational system based on these goals: parental school choice, intense competition, deregulation of state control, increasing local control, increasing accountability, and data-based decision-making.(That last one would increase Microsoft profits!)  
They would accomplish these goals through the use of charter schools, turning large high schools into smaller schools, emphasizing standard testing for students, basing salaries  on merit pay for teachers who improved student test scores, and firing of bad teachers and closing schools if test scores did not improve. If these things worked, all schools and students would be performing at grade level and living the American Dream.

Why Can’t Billionaires See The Effects Of Poverty?

Well–none of these programs and ideas have worked-and never will. The three billionaires never figured out that some students are homeless or do not have a room to study, have never been more than 12 blocks from home-if they have one, never have a magazine or newspaper in the home, cannot afford a computer or the Internet, are hungry most of the time, and only occasionally visit their father in jail. Bill Gates has never experienced privation, being raised by well-to-do parents and educated at Lakeside School and Harvard before dropping out. He knew how to make money. At one time he even tried to get his computer programmers identified as independent contractors so he would not have to pay them benefits such as Social Security, unemployment insurance, Workmen’s Compensation, etc.  The IRS rejected his tax proposals.
The members of the Walton family, the richest family in the world, have all become billionaires because the source of their fortunes, WalMart and Sam’s Club stores, are staffed with tens of thousands of ill-paid illegals from all around the world, in part-time servitude through irregular schedules and low wages. The taxpayers now support the employees of each WalMart in the country to the tune of about $1million. The six members of the Walton family should have all served jail time for hiring illegals, a violation of federal law. Pictures of billionaire Waltons in perp walks to jail would have had a profound effect on other employers trying to hire cheap labor. They would have eliminated 16 ft. border fences, the sale of 17 ft. ladders, and the hiring of 20,000 Border Patrol officers.
Eli Broad should know better. The son of an immigrant Jewish house painter and dressmaker in the Bronx, he had to be blind to the poverty that surrounded him and his family. To make college money he sold women’s shoes, garbage disposals door-to-door, and was a union drill press operator at Packard Motors in Detroit. He was lucky in life and founded two Fortune 500 companies in house building and insurance. Eli is worth more than $6 billion today and says he will give 75% of his fortune away before his death. But evidently he still can’t see what poverty does–although by living now in Los Angeles County he is surrounded by it.

Why Didn’t Eli, Bill, And The Waltons Try To Fix “The Best Health Care?”

I imagine that the Gates, Broads, and Waltons have “the best health care in the world” while the rest of the country has health care rated at 34th best in the world by the World Health Organization. Why wouldn’t they try to improve the training of doctors and the treatments available in hospitals when life expectancy among the poor, middle class, and the rich varies by as much as 30 years? Shouldn’t all those poor doctors and hospital administrators be fired and replaced with good ones? That is, if one used the same criteria in medicine as one used in education.
Dozens of education studies have shown that the problems in education are not the programs or teachers in public schools, it is poverty. All studies of human development indicate that the gap in cognitive, physical, and social development between children in poverty and middle-class children is mostly set by age three. The disaster of Leave No Child Behind  and its incessant drilling and testing does not improve education, it dulls the mind. Replacing public schools with charter schools is no answer either. Research by Stanford University shows that 83% of charters do no better-and sometimes worse-than the public schools they replaced. And often charter schools choose to operate without enrolling the mentally and physically handicapped that public schools are required to enroll by law.
According to estimates, our teachers spend an average of $1,000 of their own money on school supplies and materials for class projects each year because families don’t have enough money to provide them. Twenty percent of all K-12 schools in the country have poverty rates over 75%. Schools with poverty rates of less than 10% ranked first in science and reading and third in mathematics on international tests in the years 2005-06.
The future is not bright for the poor and the declining middle class.  We now have 48 million in low wage jobs–and 43% of new U.S. jobs since 2010 are low wage. While one in every 25 New Yorkers are millionaires, the average wage of new jobs has dropped 23%. It represents a loss of $93 billion since 2007.This means more poverty for Americans.

Raymond is a former Marine officer and school board superintendent and resides in Detroit Lakes.