Counties are responding differently to the abolition of teacher tenure. Some are suing the state. Many are complaining about the injustice. Jackson County is considering giving teachers salary supplements and offering signing bonuses. This could be good, but then one could argue that limited resources should go to students, not teachers.
Back in the day, John Wesley Powell, the guy who went on to become the Civil War amputee who mapped the Grand Canyon, went to a one-room schoolhouse. His teacher, George Crookham, took the class out to read the Great Book. It was a riverbank. The kids were able to learn a lot just by looking at nature, and, well, one of the kids went on to become an accomplished geologist.
That was then. Today, knowledge doesn’t exist in the empirical world. To train kids for 21st-century jobs, it is necessary to buy lots of computers so children may operate in the clean world of programmer assumptions. Gone are the days of teaching physics with ordinary classroom objects, or math with chalk. In addition, schools need lots of money to nurture the little brats into programs to justify state and federal budgets.
