More Money for Schools!
When you hear Michael Moore or some other leftist issue their plaintive wails about how we need “more money for education,” despite the highest per-student spending in the world, think back to this story about the abandoned Detroit public school book depository.
Pallet after pallet of mid-1980s Houghton-Mifflin textbooks, still unwrapped in their original packaging, seem more telling of our failures than any vacant edifice. The floor is littered with flash cards, workbooks, art paper, pencils, scissors, maps, deflated footballs and frozen tennis balls, reel-to-reel tapes. Almost anything you can think of used in the education of a child during the 1980s is there, much of it charred or rotted beyond recognition. Mushrooms thrive in the damp ashes of workbooks. Ailanthus altissima, the “ghetto palm” grows in a soil made by thousands of books that have burned, and in the pulp of rotted English Textbooks. Everything of any real value has been looted. All that’s left is an overwhelming sense of knowledge unlearned and untapped potential. It is almost impossible not to see all this and make some connection between the needless waste of all these educational supplies and the needless loss of so many lives in this city to poverty and violence, though the reality of why these supplies were never used is unclear. In some breathtakingly-beautiful expression of hope, an anonymous graffiti artist has painted a phoenix-like book rising from the ashes of the third floor.
Click the link for pictures. This is, yet again, why government is a failure at everything it does.
Comments
Michigan is the King of the Welfare/Entitlement States, what with the UAW and the teacher unions attempting to control the state. I see this kind of waste put up with and even encouraged all of the time.
For example, three days before Christmas we received a huge snow and ice storm in about a three county area. My county, which is notoriously poor yet controlled by a few unions, waited until Christmas eve to plow the roads even though the storm had been over for at least 24 hours. They waited until then to plow so their union county road commission workers could get paid triple time for working on Christmas Eve and Christmas. And work they did, some of the guys and girls were out in their trucks for upwards of 16 hours.
It’s a running joke in the entire three county area. I go to church in the county east of here and I work in the county directly west of here. You could tell what county you were in by the condition of the roads. The roads were bare in both the eastern and western counties while they were snow and ice covered where I live. It’s pathetic.
http://brnation.d2sector.net/detroit/ue_detroit_public_school_warehouse.htm
another good one.
This is, yet again, why government is a failure at everything it does.
How so? Which government? Local state or city gov? OR the Fed?
I’m not saying that gov is perfect, but if you make what seems to me ot be an ignorant statement, you have to quantify and qualify that.
Frankly, that is a perfect case for the “Fraud, Waste and Abuse” hotline to take care of. IT looks like hundreds of thousands of dollars wasted. And someone LOCALLY knew about it.
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Can’t ignore the prole masses soiling their own nests, as usual.