Hairs on a bobbin old bunt. Hairs on a bobbin.

This is important for the following reason: the quality of education in a state is largely determined by the actions of whichever political party controls that state.

If you ask someone in the United States what the major differences between the two parties are their answer will be influenced by which party they vote for.  But if you ask someone outside of the States most knowledgeable people will say this: the Republicans are the party for big business and the Democrats are the party for the poor.

In America this belief won’t go down very well because the Republican Party has, despite a record of cutting taxes to the rich and cutting the welfare of the poor, convinced their voters that they are the party that is trying to help the poor.

This lie can only be believed by those who are not in possession of the facts or those whose minds have been poisoned by Fox News.  But that is beside the point.  For the purposes of this post the part that is important is that Republican states tend to have Republican governors and Republican governors tend to have policies that are similar to the policies of their party.

In other words Republican governors are far more likely to cut funding to the education of the poor than Democrat governors are.
There is an absurd policy in America that states that if you live in a rich area you should be given a superior education and if you live in a poor area you should be given an inferior one.  This belief is considered so ridiculous around the world that often when I mention it people think I’ve made it up, or that it’s some sort of conspiracy theory.  But it’s true.

"News for working people" my titanium ass.

Whenever you hear someone on American TV say that they have moved somewhere “for the schools” what they’re saying is they have moved to a wealthy area because the schools there will be better, by law.

Some Americans say that I’m mistaken in this and that the truth is simply that schools in wealthy areas are always given more tax money and thus they tend to have better facilities and teachers and also better courses for students.

The only appropriate response to this point is to ask the question “how is that any different from what I said?”

Think about it.

The Republican Party, being the party of the rich, is far more likely to enforce this classist state of affairs.  Since they are also the party that most often cuts back on social spending they are also more likely to remove after-school programs and other initiatives aimed at improving the education of the poor.

So it seems likely that in Republican states the education for the rich will be unaffected, but the education for the poor will be less good than the education that the poor receive in Democrat states.

It is also possible that the slashing of welfare programmes in the red states also leads to more poor people in general, thus compounding the problem.

So when I look at these graphs I don’t see that the red states are full of stupid people. I see solid evidence that the Republican Party’s policies are leading to a kind of education that is demonstrably weaker than the kind available in the Democrat states, at least as far as the poor are concerned.

Despite the fact that, in my opinion, voting for the Republicans really is a pretty silly thing to do, those graphs do not mean that Republican states are less intelligent.  They simply mean that those states are getting what they voted for: state governance that doesn’t believe in decent education.

-TTB

Mind the gap, or it'll eat your family.

[Standard Disclaimer: this post was entirely my own opinion and was not paid for in any way, directly or otherwise, by anyone or anything that stands to gain in any way from the ideas expressed herein.]

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