Melissa Harris-Perry has one of those MSNBC spots in which hosts “lean forward” into progressive verities. In this case, the need for more education spending. The problem as Harris-Perry sees it is that our view of parenting isn’t sufficiently collectivist:
The visual of MSNBC hosts raising my children is certainly enough to give me chills but that’s not the real problem here. Actually, there are two problems. First up is the presumption that we’re not collectivist enough.
We have universal K-12 education and networks of community colleges and state schools supported by low-interest government loans. Some college is available to almost everyone who wants to work at it. Plus we have a President proposing universal pre-school which, if it were to pass, would mean kids enter public care starting at age 3 and continuing until they are at least 17-18. This isn’t communal enough?
The second problem with Harris-Perry’s argument is her contention that we haven’t invested enough in public education. In fact, the U.S. spends more per pupil than nearly every other first world nation but, unfortunately, the results we get for those dollars are worse than other countries in terms of math and science scores.
One of the chief reasons we’re stuck spending so much and getting so little are teacher’s unions which make firing bad teacher’s all but impossible. And who supports teacher’s unions despite their negative effect on state budgets and student performance? MSNBC and progressives like Melissa Harris-Perry.