[smel]

Personally, I don't see how being wealthy would stop anyone from being a hick. I also don't believe that Alabama has more hicks than the rest of the country. To me a hick is someone who is ignorant and does not take care of themselves or their responsibilities. I have seen people that fit that criteria all over the country. It seems like some people just need somone to pick on to make themselves feel better, and many people seem to choose Alabama. I have defended my home state over and over on this forum, and frankly, I am tired of it. If you have never visited Alabama, come see for yourself what we have to offer. If you have visited, then you know that we are a very beautiful, diverse state and not stuck in a time warp of racism and hate. Yes, I believe there are racists in Alabama; but I believe there are racists everywhere. Alabama, along with the rest of the nation, has some work left to do to achieve racial harmony.

[pennquaker09]

I've said this before, but it all goes back to the residents and their unwillingness to accept or desire change. People just want everything to stay the same. The schools don't have money, but no one wants to pay taxes OR change the way the system is designed. So, the schools, with the exception of Mountain Brook, Vestavia, Hoover, and to a lesser extent Huntsville, Muscle Shoals, an Florence, will continue to suffer. Florence and Muscle Shoals don't have enough million plus dollar homes for a strong property tax base.

[marmac]

Originally Posted by pennquaker09

I've said this before, but it all goes back to the residents and their unwillingness to accept or desire change. People just want everything to stay the same. The schools don't have money, but no one wants to pay taxes OR change the way the system is designed. So, the schools, with the exception of Mountain Brook, Vestavia, Hoover, and to a lesser extent Huntsville, Muscle Shoals, an Florence, will continue to suffer. Florence and Muscle Shoals don't have enough million plus dollar homes for a strong property tax base.

School districts all over the US are hurting.

In the high tax states, many citizens are saying "no" at the polls as school districts constantly are having levy referendums to keep raising property taxes.

[ghett61]

Originally Posted by pennquaker09

I've said this before, but it all goes back to the residents and their unwillingness to accept or desire change. People just want everything to stay the same.

That right there is exactly why we as a state are towards the bottom in so many categories. Why does Alabama have a high poverty rate? That has a lot to do with the bad education rate. The education rate is low becuase kids are just following in their parents' footsteps. Its a cycle that will continue until a generation of kids decide to break it.

[cpg35223]

Originally Posted by marmac

School districts all over the US are hurting.

In the high tax states, many citizens are saying "no" at the polls as school districts constantly are having levy referendums to keep raising property taxes.

And you just raised an important point, namely that there's this kneejerk response that education spending is not enough.

However, the truth simply doesn't jibe with the political rhetoric.

In 2010, Alabama state and local governments will spend roughly $15.5 billion on education. The GDP for Alabama in 2010 is around $172 billion. Alabama state and local spending 2010 - Charts Tables History

This means that 9.0% of Alabama's GDP currently goes towards education. That's a higher percentage than countries such as Sweden, Canada, Japan, Germany, or any other industrial nation. Total expenditure as % of GDP (most recent) by country

So this clearly means that Alabama is not underspending when it comes to education. Where does the money go?

[PortCity]

^^^ Wow 15 billion in education ??!! Well that sort of make sense being that the state spend around 300 million on Mobile County alone I think. So the state isn`t the blame it`s the counties that are recieving the funding. I`m asking what are certain counties such as my very own (Mobile) are doing with the money ?

[chj]

Originally Posted by cpg35223

And you just raised an important point, namely that there's this kneejerk response that education spending is not enough.

However, the truth simply doesn't jibe with the political rhetoric.

In 2010, Alabama state and local governments will spend roughly $15.5 billion on education. The GDP for Alabama in 2010 is around $172 billion. Alabama state and local spending 2010 - Charts Tables History

This means that 9.0% of Alabama's GDP currently goes towards education. That's a higher percentage than countries such as Sweden, Canada, Japan, Germany, or any other industrial nation. Total expenditure as % of GDP (most recent) by country

So this clearly means that Alabama is not underspending when it comes to education. Where does the money go?

I don't think it is the state not spending enough on education. I think it is attitudes towards education in the state. In the 9th grade I took an algebra class and my teacher would give us homework assignments and the next morning in class he would have the answers wrote on the board and would go over them and as long as you made changes to your work he would accept it. I know people who would set in the front of the class and do the homework as he was explaining the answers and would recieve an A. The problem with the schools in Alabama is that the students do not care and the teachers only want to get paid.

[Charles]

Originally Posted by chj

I don't think it is the state not spending enough on education.
I think it is attitudes
he would have the answers wrote on the board
I know people who would set in the front

The problem with the schools in Alabama is that the students do not care and the teachers only want to get paid.

A couple things I learned in school (besides sentence structure, grammar, spelling, and punctuation) was objective thinking. That is, I learned not to draw conclusions based on one piece of data.

[cpg35223]

Originally Posted by Charles

A couple things I learned in school (besides sentence structure, grammar, spelling, and punctuation) was objective thinking. That is, I learned not to draw conclusions based on one piece of data.

Well, the numbers I provided above were pretty cut and dried. To me, those figures demonstrate pretty clearly that we do not have a funding problem in this state. Instead, what we truly have is an allocation problem. How is the money being used? How are we measuring effectiveness?

I realize this is anecdotal, but I think this incident speaks volumes. I was asked to visit an inner-city high school as part of a career training assessment program. Fifteen or so kids would present their projects to me and several other local business leaders and then a state official would ask us to assess the program's effectiveness.

Let me tell you. I loved the teachers and the kids. The teachers were dedicated and really were doing a great job. The kids were wonderful, too, showing curiosity, energy, and a mastery of the basics (Which is plenty, from my perspective). It was the woman from the Alabama Board of Education who worried me.

She never spoke once to the kids or the teachers. She never asked us what we thought of the kids. Instead, she asked me and the other three businessmen (People who had taken time off from their busy workdays, by the way) to go through two binders and make sure ALL THE FORMS WERE FILLED OUT CORRECTLY. To me, that right there cut to the heart of the education system--where going through all the bureaucratic motions takes precedence over the actual performance in the classroom.

Based on my experience with various boards of education, I would argue that a very large part of the problem has to do with bloated educational bureaucracies that absorb disproportionate funding, while the classrooms still have to beg for resources.

[fatmancomics]

All I can go by is personal experience. Every place has beautiful areas but the people usually mess it up.

I went to Chicago and it's a beautiful city but everyone there gave me hard time for having a black girl as my girlfriend. Her friends even gave her a hard time about it in front of me and some black guy actually yelled at her when we were downtown. The only people who showed any manners were her family (who we stayed with) and their neighbors.

The whole city was also very segregated. White people lived in one area, black people in another and the small group of hispanics still in another. That was in the 90s. Things may have changed since then but I haven't been back to find out.

I drove to Auburn to drop off the same girl at school with the same family and, when we pulled over to eat on the way back, the whole diner stopped dead in it's tracks when her father and I walked in. His mother, niece and nephew stayed in the car, we got our food to go and ate in a parking lot down the road. Not a friendly feeling at all. This also happened in the 90s.

I moved to Santa Maria, CA and lived there alone for one year while engaged to my wife who is also black. Everything was great for that first year but, when she moved in, suddenly I noticed people staring at us and she told me that she was being treated badly at work. Customers would walk by other employees who were not busy and go directly to my wife, who WAS busy and demand she wait on them.

The people who stared and treated her the worst? Mexicans fresh across the border who hardly spoke spanish let alone english. Santa Maria is 51% Mexican while black people are among the 3% "everything else" category which probably explains why I was treated so well that first year and why she was treated so poorly. Not to mention that there were clear divisions on where the people with money (who happened to be mostly white) lived and where the ones with less means were allowed to live.

My downstairs neighbor even told me about a cousin of his who had decided to marry a black woman and whose parents were giving him a hard time about it. That same neighbor's kid, who had given me no problems during that first year, suddenly started complaining about us being too loud upstairs when my wife moved in. That was three years ago.

I know that L.A. has had and still has problems based on racism but it is still the least segregated and most accepting place I've been to since coming to this country. My family is here and my wife's family is here. My neighbors across the street are an "interracial" couple with mixed children and the rest of my neighborhood is very diverse. It's not perfect; there's a couple of neighbors who are jackasses (my next door neighbor's mom throws dirt on my walkway when she weeds and their tree constantly sheds leaves on my driveway) but at least it's not anything based on skin color.