There are a few states that are really opening up school choice. I think Arizona basically allows it for anybody now and lets students take 90% of their state money with them. Tennessee is starting a new ESA voucher program. Florida already has one. West Virginia is working on one. I think (hope) school choice will be seen as the civil rights issues of our time. Insane how many poor kids we've condemned to nonfunctioning schools. The wokesters focus on things like whether men can compete in women's sports, but I think future generations are going to (rightfully) view it as incredibly callous and cruel that we would tell poor kids tough **** on the education front. Better hope your parents can afford private school or figure out how to move you to a decent school district.
OT: Top states for doing business
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There are a few states that are really opening up school choice. I think Arizona basically allows it for anybody now and lets students take 90% of their state money with them. Tennessee is starting a new ESA voucher program. Florida already has one. West Virginia is working on one. I think (hope) school choice will be seen as the civil rights issues of our time. Insane how many poor kids we've condemned to nonfunctioning schools. The wokesters focus on things like whether men can compete in women's sports, but I think future generations are going to (rightfully) view it as incredibly callous and cruel that we would tell poor kids tough **** on the education front. Better hope your parents can afford private school or figure out how to move you to a decent school district.
I think the federal/state governments have failed society on education a long time ago. We're well past that point. That tax money will help a lot of people get a better education. And I probably wouldn't have said that 20 years ago because I've always supported public education. I've said for years, people should be able to send their kids to the best school possible and not be limited by some damn district line.
Just to nit pick (but over a distinction I think is actually important), you've always supported government run schools but it sounds like you still support public education. If you support vouchers and school choice, why would that mean you don't support public education? If Medicaid pays a private hospital to provide care, people still generally call that publicly provided healthcare. I don't see why government paying for the public wouldn't be considered public education just because the government isn't the direct employer of the teachers and administration.
Its almost as if we shouldnt base school funds on property taxes since the wealthy get a lot and the poor have less available with more to do. That leads to obvious inequity.
In my state, you can open enroll to another school district. Dont like the one you are at? Go elsehwere. Go to the neighboring district, go to the large metro district, go to the wealthy suburban district, or go to one 40mi away where your parents work. Its a free for all.
The real challenge is transportation- if kids cant reliably get to schools when a bus doesnt pick them up, then that school isnt a benefit.
It's not just Chevron and Keesler. It's people that are buying because they can cash out a half million in equity from selling their home and buy a home for cash on the coast with money left over. It's some people that are buying in Mississippi while renting in California. I don't know how many of them are actually relocating permanently versus riding out COVID and now telecommuting but planning on keeping the property as an investment.
And I guess it's fun to **** on the Coast's water, but it is for better or worse the most desirable place to live in Mississippi, as everywhere else has at best "**** brown" lakes, ponds, and/or rivers. There are certainly people that prefer even smaller towns and want to be closer to better hunting or whatever, but they are overall a pretty small minority. I have not seen anybody from California where I live or am from or heard anybody from Madison or Desoto County talk about all the California transplants. Nor do I hear people from the coast talking about eventually wanting to get to any other place in Mississippi, where as plenty of people want to get to the Coast eventually.
Seriously, if you want to be destroyed on this issue, PM me. I'm not wasting anymore time on the public board with this.
They would, but it makes a bigger difference for some states (Mississippi and California being near the top of those). The pitch for economic development in Mississippi used to be that if you exclude everybody below the poverty line across all states and reranked them on whatever measure, Mississippi's demographic/SES stats would be more or less exactly middle of the road, the idea being that yes, Mississippi may have challenges because of the large number of poor, but if you are worried about your employees, for people who are employed full time and are reasonably skilled, living in Mississippi doesn't look any different than living in most of the country outside of urban centers. This would be particularly true if you were pitching a site outside of the Delta. Not sure how successful that ever was, but it seems about as good of a spin as you can put on it.
Theoretical question - why do you (or anybody) support public education. Not saying you shouldn't, just wondering why? Because they told us to way back when, and it's free and convenient? Nobody ever thinks about these things. Does anybody ever think about how schools came into being in the first place, the way we see it now, with age groups segregated and a militaristic function?
Ha, I dont want to be destroyed publicly or privately. Infrastructure is terrible in most every state I have read about. If you want to pick and choose what to focus on in MS and argue its not only good, but actually overbuilt, have at it.
And if you want to actually read the links I provided and respond to the comments from engineers, go wild.
If 3 californians are moving to 17ing Laurel, Mississippi, how many do you think are moving elsewhere? Hint: It's a lot. https://lao.ca.gov/laoecontax/article/detail/265
They tax at a high enough level, but they don't spend their taxes on improving their state. They give their taxes out to rent seekers. California is in a good position long term because it's close to paradise on earth and they can afford to be really corrupt and inefficient. If they wanted to pay off all their unfunded pension obligations, they could get billionaires to pony up in exchange for being protected from California's long term governance tomorrow.
You ever wonder why? Or a better question is, why it is rated that way by "these engineers"?
If you only knew who "these engineers" really were.
And here I go, wasting more time.
I don't know if we're behind or not. We seem to have extra capacity on our major thoroughfares. I-55 not going to the coast is a problem, and ideally we'd have an interstate quality east to west connection where 82 is, but generally, most places that are competitive for site locations I think have good enough access to roads.
For ports, the access to the Mississippi State Port is too shallow and it being in a downtown area is not ideal. Not sure how to compare it to other ports and whether we've failed to invest in it properly or if it's just limited by geography. Not sure how pascagoula port is. Are our river ports ******? Louisiana obviously has a lot more canal access, but I'm not sure if that's better planning on their part or a function of geography and them having a lot of low lying land more appropriate for canals. Do we not have decent river port city populations because our river ports are ******? Or do we not have better ports because the population wasn't there first?
For pipelines, it seems like we have pretty good natural gas access across most of the state? Don't have the pipelines for a lot of chemical processing like say Louisiana or Texas, but I think that's not lack of planning on our part as much as a function of where the feed stocks are located?
Airports, no clue how to judge. Obviously our passenger service is limited. I would assume as much federal money as we have gotten over the years that our airports would generally have more capacity than they should, but don't really know.
For Rail, we're probably a little light on rail coverage? Feel like there are tracks in everytown, but I guess maybe a lot of those are short line tracks that are not desirable for locating major industries?
I meant I'm more open to private schools than I used to be. Tax dollars would be going there, as well as public schools. Now, we'll have to see how that goes and if it got abused, but I'm more open to it.
From the appointment of superintendents, to ridiculous administration overkill, to state testing (teaching to it), public schools are a mess in a huge number of MS districts. It's about as corrupt a system as it could be.
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Diversity. People need to be involved with others that don't look like them. In the public, at college, and on your job, you'll need to be able to work with different people and cultures. Private schools are generally extremely limiting in that. I believe if people had tax money to move to them, that would change at a number of those private schools. At least to a point.
As Johnson mentioned, poor people are limited, but I think the "don't give a **** about education parents" are huge problem too. And certainly, some of that is because they aren't educated. Most kids that go private, have parents that give a **** about education.
If an inner city Jackson kid wants to go somewhere else, I say give them that opportunity.
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Property taxes seem like a good way to keep some local knowledge, but I don't think it's a big issue either way compared to the schools having accountability and not just getting money regardless of their results. It would also ease a lot of cultural issues if governments got into the funding role rather than the role of actually operating the schools. No reason for the government to have to make rules on whether schools can have unisex bathrooms or not. Or should wear uniforms or not. Fund the education and let parents manage the tradeoffs the best they can with just some big picture minimum requirements (e.g., no discriminating on race or religion of students; minimum performance on reading and math to be able to continue receiving funds (probalby need to adjust for SES of students for this) but otherwise leave curriculum up to schools and parents, etc.)
You pivoted from blaming gay people to blaming black people. Mississippi isn't going to 'blame game' it's way out of poverty. We're all going to have to pull on this rope in the same direction. To me, the biggest problem the state faces is that it simply does not want to invest in itself. The bad roads, bad schools, bad labor, bad healthcare, bad economy are manifestations of that lack of investment.
I would point out they have MS ranked #33 in the 'Life, Health & Inclusion' category. That seems WAY too high to me. The life expectancy for Mississippi residents is below most South American countries - by far the lowest in the US. The simple word 'inclusion' is very triggering for huge portions of MS' residents. If there's one category where it should be #50 - it seems like it should be that one.
I would point out they have MS ranked #33 in the 'Life, Health & Inclusion' category. That seems WAY too high to me. The life expectancy for Mississippi residents is below most South American countries - by far the lowest in the US. The simple word 'inclusion' is very triggering for huge portions of MS' residents. If there's one category where it should be #50 - it seems like it should be that one.
I've traveled all over the country. Our roads are just about as good as any. We just need more of them and an expansion of some. MDOT needs to build more overpasses and stop dropping down red lights all up and down Hwy 49 too. MDOT needs to look at other states and learn. They seem to be stuck in 1975.
As I said before, I don't know whether our infrastructure is good or not, but if I was going to get paid hefty design fees on new investments if our infrastructure was deemed insufficient, I can certainly tell you what my opinion of the sufficiency of the infrastructure would be.
Mississippi has a significant percentage of its population that is on the Government Tit and has no desire to improve their situation.
Public education is vital because it allows our communities and country to continue to progress forward at a rate which would otherwise not be seen.
Compulsory education has shown on a macro level to raise the floor while not lowering the ceiling. It has given us a higher educated labor force and economic stability.
Simply put- it allows more people to be educated compared to private education.
I struggle to seriously consider not having public education as an option. It is so clearly absurd a thought that its tough to think thru all the ramifications.
As for the claim that schools have a militaristic function, I dont know what that means.
On a related note, my kids spent pre school(3yo) thru 8th grade(14yo) in a public school where their classrooms were 3 grades together. Pre school, pre-k, k together. 1st, 2nd, 3rd together. 4th, 5th, 6th together. 7th and 8th together. Its worked great.
That's a good answer. And I agree it must be an option.
The question was really more aimed at people who are anti-private school, and believe that everyone should be publicly educated.
It's actually the opposite. Our roads have too much capacity and are overbuilt. The issue we have is maintaining the large amount of inventory.
https://www.globest.com/2022/03/07/...fornia-keeps-growing/?slreturn=20220614141805
Not sure what size they are limiting this to. But in general, with all the advantages California has, and what a pain it is to relocate a business, it's amazing that the government manages to make it so inhospitable that any businesses leave.
And that's not just the welfare queens, look at all the various government employees or ngo's whose full salaries are funded with federal and state monies. Businesses would have to pay employees over $45k and train everyone in order to be only somewhat profitable.
Ah. I took the 'or anybody' to mean me, but see that you meant anybody who is anti-private school.
I will say that while I am not anti-private school, I do have serious reservations about public tax dollars being used to fund private schools. I find it abhorrent that tax dollars could be used to support a school that teaches intolerance or hate. Similarly, schools that teach what is not readily accepted science as determined by the dept of ed should not be able to receive tax dollars for student tuition. Furthermore, any private school that receives tax dollars should have to be able to educate ANY students from the district in which the school resides. If private schools only take students that do not have learning or physical disabilities, then those groups of students are left out and the public school district continues to educate them at a higher cost per student than before(since lower cost students are gone along with the associated funding.
^ Besides the obvious huge danger of this being allowed, which is that students whose education costs more will not be given access to that alternative education so many champion for, a real kick in the dick will be when testing scores are then compared and private schools who dont have the learning and physically disabled kids test higher than local public districts and those results are then held up as some sort of evidence that school choice works.
If private schools want to admit anyone regardless of physical or learning disability and the schools will not discriminate or teach pseudo-science and pesudo-history- sure lets try out vouchers.
It's happening at public schools now. It's probably going to happen regardless, but I don't think public schools funded indirectly controlled by the public are going to be any more successful than letting parents decide what they will tolerate. Certainlly wouldn't have been true over most of our history, but I think you'd end up with less intolerance by leaving it to parents now.
I understand the concern, but that is a very slippery slope. Most people don't believe in science, seemingly especially the people that claim to believe in science. As long as people can do actual math, chemistry, physics, etc., I'm less concerned about what they learn in the less immediately applicable sciences, as society is and historically has been so bad at determining things like this politically.
Schools are already provided more funds for special need students. If it's not enough to actually compensate the costs, I would say the fix is to not make them reliant on funds tied to other students. I also don't think every school needs to offer those services, as long as one in the relevant area does. I would envision something like the "provider of last resort" model used by some deregulated utility markets (but ignore how awful the term sounds; it just means someone retains an obligation to serve, not that they're the last and worst option).
People are pretty much already savvy to this, as they try to correct for selection effects with charters. Where we do an awful job with this is traditional public schools. If you look at Mississippi's school ratings, it's largely just a ranking of the SES of the students with some outliers. I think we would have better public schools in general if we did a better job of separating test scores by socioeconomic status. And ideally race although that would be politically fraught. Parents look at middling rankings and think they may need to send their kids to private school, when if they looked at how kids from homes like theirs do (i.e., homes where people are invested enough in education to consider private school and have the resources to pay), they'd probably see that the public school is just as good if not better at least on the education side.
I think I've more or less responded to all this above, but I'd also point out that you seem to be comparing a realistic voucher program to an idealized and non-existent version of public schools. Proponents of vouchers could just as easily say, if public schools want to stop leaving hundreds of thousands of kids without access to a decent and safe education, and stop having a significant number of their students end up in jail, and manage to avoid having teachers or administrators or coaches stop sexually abusing students another few million students in the future, then we can consider keeping the public school system as is.
Vouchers aren't perfect, but it would be hard to do worse for our poor children than we are doing now, and even if it didn't move the needle much, it would still be much better morally. We can't fix the home situation of every student, but we can at least provide an avenue for poor parents that care that doesn't involve them relocating to somewhere that's harder for them to afford.
Nah, traffic backs up on 49 all over the place. Im from Jackson to the coast a lot. It's a damn mess. Let me cruise about 80 and stop making me stop all the time. I clocked it one time from the coast to Florence. Lights cost me over and hour. That's damn ridiculous.
Go drive around the state of New York or even in CO or pretty much anywhere. Our roads are pretty damn good. Now our bridges, that's another story. Maybe that's why we don't build overpasses. We can't maintain the bridges we've got.
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We agree.
And while most conservatives will champion this voucher thing as a good thing, and say that the "danger" you speak of does not apply to a Christian private school, I would counter and ask them what will they think when someone opens a Muslim school and teaches jihad and gets federal money to do it? Then watch their jaws hit the floor.
I wouldn't say it's "hate", obviously if I'm assuming correctly and basically saying that they are teaching anti-whiteness or whatever. It's more about making everyone equal i.e. regress to the mean - which is soulless, obedient, useful idiots - whether they be useful idiots for the factories/plants/offices, the polls, the military, whatever.
And again.....I made it sound worse than it is. A lot of times the public school is the only organization many kids actually have.
Here's the problem here...
We agree about bridge maintenance. The problem is that road and bridge maintenance is funded by the state's gasoline tax which has been 18.4 cents per gallon since 1987 (edit 1989)-- it needs to go up since costs have increased over a thirty-five year period; however, not many people want that & even more so during a recession.
We agree about bridge maintenance. The problem is that road and bridge maintenance is funded by the state's gasoline tax which has been 18.4 cents per gallon since 1987 (edit 1989)-- it needs to go up since costs have increased over a thirty-five year period; however, not many people want that & even more so during a recession.
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This is the sort of logic you use to say that "our infrastructure sucks"? Cherry-picking Highway 49? It's a typical state highway, and now it's a lot better in Richland/Florence. It was never meant to be controlled access.
We have 4-lanes everywhere, to damn near everywhere. We were well ahead of Alabama as far as capacity. We punch above our weight with interstates too. Bridges suck everywhere, all over this country, not a Mississippi problem.
Mississippi's biggest problem is the river rock we put in our asphalt for so many years, and clay. MDOT actually does a hell of a job.
Using that CNBC ranking the OP cited, Mississippi is 46th in infrastructure so there could be some room for improvement.
MDOT does very well considering how little they get. They as well as counties and cities should get more funds. There's no way that they're going to be funded at the rates that some state officials and business leaders would like (almost double) but I'd like to see how creative they can be with a 10 percent increase.
MDOT does very well considering how little they get. They as well as counties and cities should get more funds. There's no way that they're going to be funded at the rates that some state officials and business leaders would like (almost double) but I'd like to see how creative they can be with a 10 percent increase.
There is a slight difference between Christian school and a muslim school teaching jihad. But even so, if we have enough parents that support a school that teaches jihad (and we do in some places, or if not Jihad some pretty nasty stuff), the bigger problem is that we have a community of those people, not that they are not paying full freight out of pocket for their school. To the extent that happens, I think the magnitude of that problem will be much lower than the current problem of trapping a lot of students into effectively criminal environments better at producing more violent criminals than at providing an education to students.
I travel quite bit as well, and I do not consider the roads in MS to be an asset. Your point might be that it's easy to travel throughout the state on those roads though. I understand that point, but the roads themselves are clearly underfunded. Goat's comments are correct.
BTW, I originally said 'roads', but we can expand out to 'infrastructure' and no one defends it. You're correctly being critical of bridges in other posts, and Jackson's airport is a disaster. Have you been in New Orleans' lately by chance? It's very nice now. Birmingham's is too. I had a co-worker from CO traveling to Meridian earlier this year. I told him to fly into one of those two instead of Jackson and the added 'windshield' time was justified. Honestly, unless you're going into 3 or 4 counties in central MS, i would recommend everyone use out of state airports when traveling to MS. We compete against those cities for resources; that stuff matters.
BTW, I originally said 'roads', but we can expand out to 'infrastructure' and no one defends it. You're correctly being critical of bridges in other posts, and Jackson's airport is a disaster. Have you been in New Orleans' lately by chance? It's very nice now. Birmingham's is too. I had a co-worker from CO traveling to Meridian earlier this year. I told him to fly into one of those two instead of Jackson and the added 'windshield' time was justified. Honestly, unless you're going into 3 or 4 counties in central MS, i would recommend everyone use out of state airports when traveling to MS. We compete against those cities for resources; that stuff matters.
Gulfport-Biloxi is as nice or nicer. I’d put it up against any. Incredibly well-run. Of course, you’re just talking about terminals here, because that’s all the public ever really thinks about. The terminal is the ONLY nice thing about Birmingham, and that’s because it’s brand new. I would still not consider that airport nice overall.
If someone is traveling to Starkville, Tupelo, Meridian, Hattiesburg or the Coast, you really should be encouraging them to use those local airports, especially GPT. Memphis is appropriate for NW MS.
That one worked in the medical field. Had it not I doubt we would HAVE a medical field in Mississippi today.
THE best way to improve public schools would be to OUTLAW private schools. If every kid in every place had to go to public schools, it would DRAMATICLY improve the public schools. It's no surprise that most of the best public schools in Mississippi are in areas where there aren't that many private schools. Sadley that probably isn't legal. I'm prepared for the incoming flak, but that IS the truth.
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