The Problem is Poverty, the Cause is.....

School budget time brings out the worst in education critics. And by critic I mean those that find all sorts of things wrong with the education system and are not credentialed educators. Translation – They are not teachers because they lack the necessary degrees to teach.

I love telling them that if teaching s so easy, why don't they get the degree and get into the classroom. After all, with all their “real world knowledge” and masterful abilities, they would make a great and positive impact on some students' lives.

Listen for the crickets.

That being said, NPR – the tax payer funded, pro-corporate news service (by and large) – runs a series on education called “School Money” that looks at all the money that is spent on education and the results that we receive. And it is largely negative from what I can gather.

M. Fernanda Asitz PhD responds to this capitalist propaganda and hit piece in an article in the”Viewpoints” section of the Sunday Buffalo News called “There's no 'silver bullet' for fixing low performing schools.” It's decently written too.

In a nutshell, there are many different ways that have been shown to improve education, student achievement, whatever cliché you want to use but there is really no perfect one because each school community is different.

One thing that is common to all under performing schools though – poverty. All the educational gimmicks in the world will do nothing to address this problem.

That's because it is not a problem of the educational system.

It's a necessary part of the capitalist economic system.

In order for the 1% to be the 1% and for the paper and pencil pushers on Wall Street to make their profits, the working class have to be squeezed of every possible penny. Profits must be maximized so workers' wages and benefits must be minimized.

This leaves people without adequate food, clothing, shelter, medical care, and anything else necessary to make life livable.

So the problem in education isn't teachers or students. It's capitalism.

Capitalism denies workers the wages they deserve for the products and services that they make possible because someone else needs to be rich.

Capitalism, in driving people into the prison of poverty, keeps communities poor and lacking the resources necessary to make education and improvement a possibility.

So, what is to be done? (To blatantly borrow a title from Lenin.)

First: $15 NOW is a good start, but that leaves capitalism in place. We need to transition into a socialist economic system that gives the workers ownership of the means of production and control over the profits. We can look to Richard Wolff and Gar Alperovitz's writings on worker owned and worker run cooperatives for ideas on what to do. Mondragon is a nice example to look at. We need to move from cooperatives working in a capitalist economy to a socialist economy. Places like GM, Ford, Chrysler, Boeing, and other large manufacturers need to be turned over to the workers as well.

Second: Food, clothing, shelter, medical care, and education must be seen as human rights and society has a responsibility to help people when they fall down. It's not possible? No seriously. How fast did we bail out Wall Street and the banks in 2007-08? We can cough up that type of cash for them every time they face plant in a pasture patty, we can help the least in society. And it will cost us so much less.

I want to type more, but I have more doctors coming to do more tests to figure out why I have been blacking out and have been having massive chain headaches, so I will leave it up to you to add to Lenin's line while I play human needle cushion.

We need to remember – capitalism is the problem and socialism is the solution.