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Comment by Herring | Hacker News Reader

In theory yeah, but in practice 54% will also vote against funding education. Catch-22.

In WA they always pass levies for education funding at local and state level however results are not there.

Mississipi is doing better on reading, the biggest difference being that they use phonics approach to teaching how to read, which is proven to work, whereas WA uses whole language theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_language), which is a terrible idea I don't know how it got traction.

So the gist of it, yes, spend on education, but ensure that you are using the right tools, otherwise it's a waste of money.

First time hearing of whole language theory, and man, it sounds ridiculous. Sounds similar to the old theory that kids who aren't taught a language at all will simply speak perfect Hebrew.

I almost agree, but too many people will take that to mean “we need to do more with less”. It’s a feature of capitalism. Teachers are stretched thin in most places, that’s always the main problem. Are WA teachers compensated about the same as other similarly educated professionals? As cops?

Hire smart motivated people, pay them well, leave them alone, they’ll figure this one out. It’s not hard, anyone can google what Finland does.

> WA teachers compensated about the same as other similarly educated professionals

WA teachers are among the best salaries in the country for being a teacher (within top 5). You start at around 84k$ I think, 90k$+ if you have a masters degree, at least in Seattle, and it can scale up to 150k$ with enough seniority, as well as pension plan.

> Hire smart motivated people, pay them well, leave them alone, they’ll figure this one out. It’s not hard, anyone can google what Finland does.

The problem is not the teachers themselves, it's what the system tells them to teach. You can have the best teacher in the world, but if they use BS curricula students will unfortunately learn BS.

Think about it, you can have brilliant engineers, but an idiot ceo, and the company will fail despite the engineers.

What I'm hearing is "teachers just outside Seattle are doing great, but inside Seattle and the rest of America, they're really not." That's the local cost of living set by the tech sector.

If you don’t live in downtown nor cap hill, you can find acceptable rents in Seattle, or go further to south Seattle or north.

Seattle rents are very high in specific hip neighborhoods.

Not true, most people are not upper-middle class anti-tax wackos. They benefit from those people being taxed.

The electorate in the U.S. commonly votes against its own interests.

Pithy, but not true.

That's why you phrase it as "woke liberals turning your children gay!"

In USA K-12 education costs about $300k

350 million people, want to get 175 million of them better educated, but we've already spent $52 trillion dollars on educating them so far

The people most vociferously for conservative values are middle class, small business owners, or upper class, though the true upper class are libertine (notice who participated in the Epstein affair). The working class is filled with all kinds of very diverse people united by the fact they have to work for a living and often can't afford e.g. expensive weddings. Some of them are religious, a whole bunch aren't. It's easy to be disillusioned with formal institutions that seem to not care at all about you.

Unfortunately, a lot of these people have either concluded it is too difficult to vote, can't vote, or that their votes don't matter (I don't think they're wrong). Their unions were also destroyed. Some of them vote against their interests, but it's not clear that their interests are ever represented, so they vote for change instead.

> Their unions were also destroyed.

By policy changes giving unions less power, enacted by politicians that were mostly voted for by a majority, which is mostly composed of the working class. Was this people voting against their interests? (Almost literally yes, but you could argue that their ideological preference for weaker unions trumps their economic interest in stronger unions.)

"Thus, a caste system makes a captive of everyone within it."

If your choices in an election are pre-selected, was it democratic?

In my own social/family circle, there’s no correlation between net worth and how someone leans politically. I’ve never understood why given the pretty obvious pros/cons (amount paid in taxes vs. benefits received)

That's interesting b/c I see it very obviously in mine with the partial exception of myself. The more professional and private sector their job or spouse, the more conservative they are. E.g a real estate lawyer is conservative, a lawyer for the state is liberal, a software engineer is a communist, and the musicians are libertarians or socialist-lite.

Professional or artisanal work are petit bourgeois positions, so are flexible in their outlook regardless of income.

I have rural farmers and truck drivers in my extended family. That stereotype is low income + conservative.

If they own their own land or equipment it makes more sense. It's their relationship to production that is the driving force, but if they are not self-employed and don't own their own equipment it is a little more of an interesting situation.

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