4-Star Failure
EDUCRATS TRAVEL WELL ON TAXPAYERS’ DIME
FITSNews – April 25, 2008 – Props today to the Voice For School Choice on its efforts to expose yet another reason why South Carolina classrooms get less than half of each dollar we currently spend on the nation’s worst public education system.
According to S.C. Comptroller General Richard Eckstrom’s new spending transparency website, Department of Education officials are living high on the hog when they travel, staying at four-star hotels with four-figure bills …
Hmmm … nice to know where some of that extra billion dollars we’ve given our “children” over the last four years has gone.
Anyway, kudos to the Voice for uncovering this information, and kudos to Comptroller General Eckstrom for providing a place where taxpayers can find out how their money is actually being spent …
Comments
By A Teacher on April 25th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
Nice – if we teachers ever go to a conference, not only do we usually have to pay part of the fees out of pocket, but we can only be reimbursed for $50 a night. Any difference we pay for.
By Don Johnson on April 25th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
Great posts guys (FITS and Voice). Most South Carolinians could only wish to get a JOB at one of these places, let alone stay there.
Three cheers for Eckstrom’s website! Perhaps these guys will start thinking about staying at a Courtyard Marriott or Holiday Inn Express. It should be the Super 8 or Motel 6, but small steps, people, small steps.
Or, I don’t know, maybe DRIVE BACK TO COLUMBIA. It’s not a big state.
By tammy on April 25th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
Yeah…way to uncover information. The Dept. of Ed spent $7500 on some fancy hotels over some unknown period of time for some unknown reason.
Way to uncover the facts boys!
By Terance Booker on April 25th, 2008 at 2:24 pm
Teachers should NOT be going to conferences anyways. They should be at home grading student assignments, attending to domestic duties, and “pleasing” their husbands. We should just go back to the old days when the best teachers were old hags who only needed a pack of Marlboro’s and a rerun of Family Feud to be satisfied.
What has the world come to? don’t ask me…
By Girl Sailor on April 25th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
Tammy,
I care about them wasting 7500 bucks even if you don’t. These have got to be only a few examples of this kind of excess. I’m sure the Dept of Ed covers up the worst of it. Why are public ed higher ups are blowing the money that should be going to educating kids?
By Terance Booker on April 25th, 2008 at 2:34 pm
Also, what the heck goes on a a teacher conference anyways? Are ya’ll working on the unifying theory of quantum mechanics? Are you trading previously unknown secrets about how to fill children’s heads full of mush? We aren’t building rockets here, people. Let’s just stick to the basics, reading, writing, arithmetic and discipline with a yard stick. That’s been around for centuries and works pretty well.
By Deb O'Nare on April 25th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
Terance,
Right on. The noble efforts of the Department of Education should place its fiscal transactions on a plane above the prying eyes of the taxpayers who fund it. Right on.
By A Teacher on April 25th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
Terance,
If it has worked so well for so long, why the criticism? I wouldn’t know what goes on at most conferences, since the funding has largely dried up (it apparently only still exists for the “educrats” in the Department of Education that this site is detailing). If I ever go to one again, I will be sure contractions are on the agenda. For example, I could teach that the contraction for “you all” is “y’all.”
By palmetto pwn'd on April 25th, 2008 at 3:26 pm
all those are bills from the dept of education – not from the districts – so they are state bureaucrats, not teachers who are wasting the money.
school choice is a threat to money-wasting administrators, not effective classroom teachers who want what’s best for children
By Believe It Not (a.k.a. Sic Willie's Stalker) on April 26th, 2008 at 1:59 am
Great Letter – The State
Saturday’s Letters to the Editor
• There is no ‘choice’: support public schools
Last Saturday’s guest column by South Carolinians for Responsible Government’s Randy Page revealed the fundamental agenda of the school choice lobby who have hijacked the S.C. debate on education for years: the desire to subvert public education as the first step to disintegrating our state government.
Page wrote that voters should be “skeptical†of politicians calling for reform and change and blamed an association of government bodies for
If anything, people should be skeptical of Page’s organization, which has publicly fought against disclosing the names of its rich, white, out-of-state, plutocratic, apologist donors.
Voters should be equally skeptical of the entire incestuous network of S.C. voucher-lobbying organizations here designed by New York anti-government financier Howard Rich.
It should be abundantly clear that Page doesn’t hold the priorities of South Carolina’s middle-class and working-poor families in the highest regard.
Furthermore, it is intellectually dishonest to imply that his organization is pushing its school choice agenda because its members care about the SAT scores and graduation rates of S.C. public schoolchildren. They really want to rip government out of education because they know more of their tax dollars go toward funding it than anything else.
Page and his cohorts are part of an ideological movement to smash government without any real concern for the people who are affected by it.
What the school-choice lobbyists don’t seem to realize is that even if they got what they wanted, and all S.C. schools became privatized, the layers of government that would need to be applied to the process would bankrupt any kind of abstract limited-government philosophy they were trying to achieve. Their ideas have failed to gain any sort of legislative traction because of their obsession with abstract ideas, their failure to work in practicalities and the fact that S.C. electorate just fundamentally doesn’t agree with them.
Allowing groups such as South Carolinians for Responsible Government and people such as Randy Page to dominate the debate on education in our state would be like hiring Charles Manson as the school guidance counselor.
COREY HUTCHINS
Columbia
By fitsnews on April 26th, 2008 at 9:16 am
BIN-
Thanks for sharing these thoughts of Mr. Hutchins, who until recently was posing as an objective journalist in this state.
Always good to know the media’s take on things.
-FITSNews
By mad teacher on July 29th, 2009 at 12:19 pm
I wish people would look at the facts about teachers!!! We are the lowest paid “white collar” workers! Though I have not heard the public complain about that. We dish out at least a couple of THOUSAND dollars each in materials that our district does not pay for…..any complaints?…no….. We give our heart, love, soul, all in the name of education, only to be disrespected by parents and students….. and still NO complaints by the public!!! Most of us will be paying student loans well into retirement. People joke about teachers being poor…well it’s not just a joke we really don’t make the buckets of money that CEO’s, accountants, and other educated people make. FITSNews you should be ashamed of yourselves, if it were up to you guys we would stay at a roach infested hotel, and eat Jacks $2.99 value menu for days! I bet who ever wrote the story makes way more than the $29,000 starting salary of a first year teacher.