States Counterplan 1NC
Download 0.56 Mb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- And its increasing
- AT: California Spending DA
- AT: Education Impact
- Education reform will fail – school shortcomings are exaggerated and too many alternate causalities.
AT: Spending DASpending on transportation inevitableChristman and Riordan 2011 (Anastasia and Christine NELP – National Employment Law Project “ State Infrastructure Banks: Old Idea Yields New Opportunities for Job Creation ” http://www.nelp.org/page/-/Job_Creation/State_Infrastructure_Banks.pdf?nocdn=1 AS) State and local governments and their constituents already carry much of the burden of funding these critical resources. Nationally, “transportation” is typically the third-largest state expenditure after “education” and “public welfare.”7 Since the Cold War era, local governments have invested more than $1.25 trillion in water and sewer investments.8 As the National Conference of State Legislatures has pointed out, “Local governments—including counties, townships and municipalities—provide approximately 30 percent of total surface transportation funding and own 77 percent of the nation’s roadway miles.”9 And its increasingMusser 2012 (Brandon, Graduate student at the Central European University, Economics department, Economic Policy in Global Markets, Master’s Thesis, “The Effects of Fiscal Decentralization on Highway and Transportation Spending in the United States” April 6th http://dw.crackmypdf.com/0996971001342193466/musser_brandon.pdf AS) While infrastructure spending may be declining nationwide, there is quite a lot of variation in public spending on highway and transportation related infrastructure across the 50 states. In 2007, expenditures on highways as a percentage of total state and local expenditures ranged from a low of 3.2% in Georgia to a high of 14.6% in Iowa. Spending on transportation exhibits even more variance across states with a low of 5.4% of total expenditures in Georgia and a high of 23.6% in Kentucky. Different demographic and geographic factors are certainly responsible for some of the observed variance across states. However, on the surface, Georgia, Kentucky, and Iowa are not so drastically different in terms of size, GDP per capita, or geographical location to warrant the huge differences in spending to these factors alone. AT: California Spending DASpending now- High Speed Rail ProjectBrownfield 2012 (Mike, Assistant Director of Strategic Communications at The Heritage Foundation. He serves as editor of The Foundry, Heritage's public policy news blog, as well as the "Morning Bell," one of Washington’s most widely read and influential e-newsletters. Mike hails from Southeast Michigan and practiced law in Chicago, Illinois. “California’s High-Speed Spending Spree” The Foundry May 14th http://blog.heritage.org/2012/05/14/californias-high-speed-spending-spree/ AS) The State of California keeps sinking into a deeper hole of debt, with reports showing that the state’s budget shortfall is projected to be $16 billion, up from $9.2 billion in January. But despite all the red ink, the state is still going ahead with a high-speed rail boondoggle that would cost billions. The LA Times reports: If California starts building a 130-mile segment of high-speed rail late this year as planned, it will enter into a risky race against a deadline set up under federal law. The bullet train track through the Central Valley would cost $6 billion and have to be completed by September 2017, or else potentially lose some of its federal funding. It would mean spending as much as $3.5 million every calendar day, holidays and weekends included — the fastest rate of transportation construction known in U.S. history, according to industry and academic experts. That $6 billion is for just part of the project, which has been estimated to cost as much as $98.5 billion. But note the perverse incentive to spend. California stands to receive as much as $4 billion in federal funds that have either been provided or set aside for the project. If they don’t complete it on time, the LA Times reports, that money disappears. Now the race is on to spend. But all the spending is happening in a state that is already far in the red — and whose leaders are turning toward tax hikes in order to dig themselves out. Gov. Jerry Brown (D) is proposing a 0.25 percent increase in sales tax and an income tax surcharge on wealthy Californians to prevent him from having to cut spending. But that just means more money will be available to spend on projects like California’s high-speed rail. AT: Education ImpactEducation Not critical to competitiveness – no correlation.Kohn 2K7 (Alfie, Noted Education Policy Wonk, “Against ‘Competitiveness’ – Why Good Teachers Aren’t Thinking About the Global Economy, Education Week, Sept. 19, http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/edweek/competitiveness.htm) Various strands of evidence have converged to challenge the claim that the state of our economy is a function of how good our schools are at preparing tomorrow’s workers. For individual students, school achievement is only weakly related to subsequent workplace performance. And for nations, there’s little correlation between average test scores and economic vigor. Schools make a tempting scapegoat when a company’s financial results are disappointing or when the economy as a whole falters. But an employee’s educational background is only one of many factors that determine his or her productivity. Worker productivity, in turn, is only one of many factors that determine corporate profitability. And corporate profitability is only one of many factors that determine the state of the economy – particularly the employment picture. Does anyone seriously believe, for example, that the main reason U.S. companies are shipping jobs by the millions to Mexico and Asia is because they believe those countries’ schools are better? Education reform will fail – school shortcomings are exaggerated and too many alternate causalities.Institute for Community Studies 2005 [Private Interests and Education Reform. www.communityknowledge.ne There is strong evidence suggesting that this reasoning also applies to current school reform efforts. For-profit private companies, for example, made new strides in 1990 when Education Alternatives, Inc., began running South Pointe Elementary School in Dade County, Florida. Education Alternatives was the first for-profit private firm contracted to run a public school (Miner, 2003). More recently, greater opportunities have been created. For example, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB)sets high standards for public schools but with few additional resources to help attain these goals. NCLB sets up public schools for failure and creates more opportunities in the public school system for private companies. Are the motives behind the act genuinely supportive of the goals of public education – that everyone be adequately educated and that there be equity in education – or is the act a creation that mixes some genuine educational concerns with economic interests that distort the educational goals? More specifically, do these reforms address the educational needs of the young or the profit-making needs of investors? The escalation of economic inequality presents two correspondingly growing problems in education. First, the more obvious, that there will be an even bigger economic gap that education will fail to bridge. The second is much less recognizable and it is the one on which I will focus. This essay will argue that the growth of inequality in the Unites States, particularly the concentration of tremendous wealth in the possession of a relatively small portion of the population, has added significant momentum to the drive for education reform, and in doing so it has exaggerated the shortcomings of our schools and diverted legitimate concerns into a force that aids privatization and profit-making schemes. Directory: files files -> Answer True False 2 points Question 2 files -> Integer programming and game theory files -> 4 Integer Programming files -> Bpa vehicle Window Repair Scenario #1 task: Procure vehicle window relacement. Objective files -> Pop Warner History files -> North Carolina Inclusion Initiative Mapping Where Children with ieps are Being Served Purpose files -> Fall 2013 Spring 2014 Program Data: Standard 1 Exhibit 4d files -> Hanban – asia society confucius classrooms network 2010 request for proposal files -> Northern England’s set-jetting locations Download 0.56 Mb. Share with your friends:
|