Hasn't happened to me because I listen to video game music and if my local grocer fucking started playing the Monster Hunter theme I would absolutely lose my shit.
(Once in Japan a small shop selling pottery was playing a song from FF5 and I bought a lovely cup out of principle).
It's probably mostly propaganda that gets most people, same with USAID. People have a poor grasp of what they do and higher ups know but they likely have an interest in it, like ties to the industry or are anti-science/pro-religion or simply hate a group they want to discriminate against. DoE protects and improves the social mobility of black and brown folk and that was good enough reason in the 80s for GOP to target it, after all.
Hey yo, while we're cutting jobs I heard the secret service costs the government billions and isn't even secret, we best tell Musk on X and use a thinky emoji to show how smart that observation is.
NCLB at face value isn't bad, and I wouldn't characterize it as a competition, but it had a few fundamental flaws. The biggest was punishing underperforming schools, which is just... really stupid, like how exactly is that going to make the schools better? The second was teach to the test, since we quantified (poorly) what education is. That enforced rote memory over critical thinking and reasoning skills.
My more personal gripe is statistical, though. Using cutoff scores without actually accounting for covariates (like previous scores) has also gotta be the worst possible way to track success. If a student is reading at a 4th grade level while in 10th grade, a school is punished if they read at an 8th grade level in 11th grade (a four year improvement!). Like, Jesus Christ, I'm so glad Obama admin at least fixed most glaring problems in 2015, cause yikes.
Others already cut to the chase, but yeah. The long short of it is that's just another move to siphon funds to the wealthy at the cost of the needy. I won't say it could never work, but it would likely be less efficient if you managed the same coverage as public school.
You could draw analogies to healthcare. When healthcare is privatized, not only does everyone pay more, it also leaves a ton of people without coverage. Same for education, as every child has to be covered. The voucher system works similar to subsidized healthcare (e.g. Medicare) which kinda works but why convert a perfectly acceptable universal option with a more expensive, more complicated, and more unequal system? You just inflate costs and certain people make money while everyone else suffers... without even improving quality, no less.
That all said, I'm generally open minded. It's frustrating knowing how much better private schools are vs public.... when I attended UCLA, I was frequently surrounded by private school alumns because they had connections. They had counselors, AP courses, tutors, and here I was, a first generation who only got in because of community college. It's very unfair as it is, and I fully understand the wishful thinking some (few) might have in a voucher system. But the research just isn't behind it.
Two useful things, but there's no political incentive unfortunately. Education is usually the first thing to defund since you won't deal with ramifications until long after your term ends. Only senetors and judicial last long enough and neither are responsible for budget... you just rarely get anyone trying.
States do even things out on their end, but same issue with terms. California for instance has a budget deficit and are cutting education budgets (albeit mostly with higher ed, iirc). That means more reliance on local funds, which ironically fuck rural voters most, aka Republican districts (funny enough, this distribution of funds to rural schools is a big reason DoE survived Reagan with GOP support).
Too many armchair educators here. I literally teach a lecture on this as part of a class on students with disabilities. Key things about DoE:
It's 4% of the budget and 2/3 of that is to subsidize higher education for middle and lower income families. For K-12, it's about 5% of the budget, as most funding is state (unfortunately usually by property tax, which generally fucks poor folk).
To get that 5%, you need to play by DoE rules. That includes no discrimination, school must be free and accessible, and you need to follow IDEA, the law that gives students with disability access to an education. Without federal DoE, there is no standard requirement to accommodate kids with Autism, learning disabilities, and more. (Technically section 504 can still apply, but it's complicated. Private schools usually have that but not IDEA). Btw, about 100B + 20B for K-12 funds and disability, respectfully.
DoE funds and conducts a ton of research that improves pedagogy, not just the standard NCLB achievement tracking but things like the ELS database that is one of the few sets with data from 10th grade all the way to age 30, to directly analyze effects of high school programs on long term success. My dissertation used that, and yes, those folks are probably super-illegal fired, USAID style. If you're wondering, it's 800M in grants and research, which is chump change.
Understand, this is as idiotic as gutting the IRS. Economics have found that return on investment is tremendous (8x to 60x depending on who you ask) because you reduce crime and expensive prison costs. Simply preventing a murder saves millions of dollars, and education is shown to do this (including the very same ELS data I mentioned!)
There's more that I can say, but if you have questions, I literally have a degree in education policy. Please ask!
Gross but also... kinda curious from an A/B testing perspective to know when the user drop off happens. Kind of like, what's the pain threshold before someone stops using shitty software. The answer really should be zero but the average user... ugh, it's probably fucking 8 or 9 and we should be ashamed.
Too bad is Bing so the sample size is too small for any meaningful results.
Not crazy if you want to advertise on the down low. I worked a summer once doing that shit, it's insidious. Blockers don't even block someone pretending to like a product.
That might have been the main reason I left the other site. Wasn't banned, wasn't using apps, but one can only take so much of this being labeled r/wholesome or something before I had enough.
I mean, in some places. The tax is generally a disencentive to start the habit. I'd be curious to see a natural experiment comparing places with and without it as the US dropped it's smoking rate to low teens (at least, until vaping became a thing).
I mean, not everyone in prison is innocent. Some of them are cartel members, gang-affiliated face tats and all. But I guess, statistically speaking, quite a few probably weren't actually guilty of what they were put in for. Best not to think in absolutes.
Edit: clarified. That said, tats are not exactly something you're born with and prison tattoos are a thing, and a real problem for people seeking reform after gang membership. Family friend of mine was in XIII but ended up a muralist and needed it removed.
Yup, I know. Actually, when they did this with cigarettes they did see it go down a little with adults but the main thing was that it helped reduce youth smoking. Teens have a tighter budget for these things.
All of this is a bit of a waste, really. A lot of those people were already in US prisons to begin with. We're paying ICE to re-arrest people. It's so dumb.
Well, I mean the worst Walz did personally was maybe his performance against JD, but that's pretty small compared to a lot of other errors that can be attributed to the collective campaign decisions and DNC as a whole. And yes, Biden. And really, 2020 and 2016. Actually fuck it, compared to all the butterfly effect possibilities, Walz is such a small part of why we're in this mess, lol. I still want the 2000 supreme court to support the Florida recount that actually says Gore won.
Hasn't happened to me because I listen to video game music and if my local grocer fucking started playing the Monster Hunter theme I would absolutely lose my shit.
(Once in Japan a small shop selling pottery was playing a song from FF5 and I bought a lovely cup out of principle).