Re: Detroit to close half of schools but hands out laptops.

[Guest guest]

So the solution they came up with was the close half of the schools over the next two years and increase class sizes to over 60. They've got to be kidding to think anyone will learn anything in a zoo like that.

I think in college, the lecture hall sized classes work well for general education courses. The reason for that is because in college, you get out of it what you put in. It ought to be that way in school too. However, part of getting an education in one's pre-college years is learning how to learn. Many kids do not know how to learn. And so in a classroom of 60 students, where the instructor won't have much time to spend with the students, those students are almost certainly doomed to fail.

Maybe they should have asked the teachers and especially the administrators to take a pay cut, a few percent for the teachers and more for the more highly paid administrators?At the same time, the schools are going to be handing out 40,000 laptops. That's a monumental waste of money. That same money, combined with other small cuts could have kept the school system running for at least another year.

Pay really isn't the problem. Pensions are the problem. Where I live, a teacher can retire, and, if they have been a teacher for all of their life in the same district of the same state, draw their yearly salary as a pension for the rest of their life. We have teachers getting a pension of $125,000.00 a year. Now some would say they earned that pension, and that's true, but it's a ridiculously high pension to have in the first place. And guess what? In our state, those pensions are not subject to taxation.

Administrator