How Much Is That in TGTs?

TUCSON — After dropping $17 billion on midterm elections, much of it to sell scoundrels bent on crippling democracy to ill-informed citizens, America ought to parallel the dollar with a currency unit that keeps things in perspective. How about the TGT, short for third grade teacher?

A TGT would track teachers’ average starting pay in a nation that uses money to keep score. After falling $2,000 in the last decade, that is $41,000. Hedge-fund hogs — or election-deniers’ lawyers — can earn more in a slow week. Adjusted for inflation, it is less than in the 1970s.

Strict spending limits in a brief European-style campaign could have paid for 400,000 teachers like lovable Miss Lot at Peter Howell Elementary, who inspired us kids in the ‘50s to ask questions, think things through, then trust our own eyes and ears.

Until the Reagan ‘80s, Miss Lots across the country taught how government is supposed to work. Big colorful globes instilled curiosity about the world. Teachers like her explained about cause and effect. Kids learned to understand why when things went wrong.

If, say, a deviant president had allowed a pandemic to savage the nation, then encouraged a tyrant to set Europe ablaze, they would have likely blamed him, not a successor who restored sanity, curbed inevitable inflation and rallied disaffected allies to prevent World War III.

Professional teachers were safe from self-appointed religious posses, book burners, conniving politicians and soccer moms who want no hurt feelings by keeping score. Elections were simple choices between opposing candidates who swore allegiance to the same flag.

A House committee report ready for release — 700 pages of testimony detailing what cameras showed in real time — makes plain what has changed. A mob beat Capitol police half to death trying to lynch the vice president. Yet Republicans call that “legitimate political discourse.”

This is no accidental twist of fate. Under Ronald Reagan, the Koch brothers and other plutocrats began corrupting school boards to dumb down curricula. A privately educated ruling class rose to power by conning gullible voters in a country where only half the electorate casts ballots.

Results were evident by 2001. A score of Islamist apostates toppled the twin towers, heretically invoking Allah. Rather than pursue Osama Bin Laden, America squandered $8 trillion — 172 million TGTs — on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that spawned an incalculable number of terrorist recruits.

Donald Trump, a self-obsessed despot with crude animal instincts, only weaponizes divides that have deepened over decades. Too many voters now make snap decisions based on blatant lies. He, if not someone yet more dangerous who exploits his base, could be president in 2024.

Republicans sold a tax cut in 2017 of nearly $2 trillion, which amounts to 48 million TGTs. Now, after Joe Biden lowered Trump’s soaring deficits, the “grand old party” plans to use its congressional majority to push for another round of tax relief for the rich.

A trillion here and a trillion there add up to real money. Higher education budgets could finally pay competent, committed teachers what they are worth. Anyone who questions the need for this is clear proof of why it is so essential.

No democracy can survive without an educated citizenry that shares a common set of values and non-alternative facts.

Because few schools help students dig down to ground truth, reporters are crucial. But “news media” confuse as much as inform. Some journalists cover what matters in context. Others focus on what sells. Many mislead, lacking a reality-based worldview. Some distort on purpose.

ProPublica recently crunched the numbers. A teacher who earns $45,000 typically pays $10,700 in taxes and levies. Their 19 percent tax bite is higher than the 25 richest Americans’, who in some years entirely avoid, if not evade, income tax. An Elon Musk or a Jeff Bezos can afford to shell out a lot more TGTs.

Pay is only part of it. Miss Lot never packed a gun or faced hard scrutiny by ideologue politicians and overbearing parents. They did not take second or third jobs to pay for classroom materials essential to their classes.

Ninety percent of American schools are still public, but most are starved of resources. Surveys show more than half of all teachers are demoralized, quitting in droves to be replaced by such uncertified, unqualified stand-ins as military veterans who impose state-approved lessons on ever-larger classes.

Fixing education would take a long, difficult slog. But every year that passes brings yet more climate collapse, virulent mysterious viruses, despotic governments and simmering conflicts that risk spiraling into unstoppable world war. And America is headed in the wrong direction.

Republicans push hard for vouchers that make taxpayers fund enrollment in unregulated charter schools and other private academies. Meantime, inner-city public schools are far beyond the teachers’ nightmare Richard Brooke depicted in his 1955 film, “Blackboard Jungle.”

Charter schools began as a fast track for smart kids. But in scathing assessments after Betsy Devos championed them over public schools, the National Education Association excoriated many as substandard corporate scams bent on profit with no interest in students.

A quarter of America’s charter schools opened in the past five years have closed, and their owners pocketed billions in federal subsidies. Yet Republicans double down. “The path to save the nation is very simple,” Steve Bannon recently declared. “It’s going to go through the school boards.” (Read “destroy” for “save.”)

Arizona is a troubling bellwether. Voters chose a decent governor and senator over unhinged Trumplicans and defeated an election-denier for secretary of state. But while some states rejected candidates who targeted schools, Arizona, like many others, did not.

Tom Horne, a hardline conservative, squeaked past the incumbent superintendent of public instruction. He intends to stamp out bilingual classes and ethnic studies despite Arizona’s deep Hispanic roots. He rails against critical race theory, which is not taught in schools. A hotline will allow parents to snitch on teachers who veer from strict curricula.

Voters in 2020 approved Proposition 208, a 3.5 percent surcharge on high incomes to fund schools. Gov. Doug Ducey resisted. A Maricopa County judge said 208 was unconstitutional. A new governor must now battle in court to release billions of desperately needed dollars.

In the town of Vail near Tucson, a court just jailed a father who had barged into a school board meeting with zip ties. His kid was barred from a field trip because of suspected exposure to Covid. Other such small vignettes reveal a big picture George Packer sketched in The Atlantic:

“If you’re an American schoolchild…you’re the nonvoting, perhaps unwitting, subject of adults’ latest pedagogical experiments: either relentless test prep or test abolition; quasi-religious instruction in identity-based virtue and sin; a flood of state laws to keep various books out of your hands and ideas out of your head. Your parents, looking over your shoulder at your education and not liking what they see, have started showing up at school-board meetings in a mortifying state of rage.”

This goes way beyond politics. I was obsessed with Miss Lot’s outsized world map. Two-thirds of it was blue, a single ocean that kids learned was crucial to Earth’s closed-circuit ecosystem. Human survival depends on healthy seas full of fish and currents that safeguard the seasons.

Today, the ocean is choked with plastic and refuse -- fast overheating, acidifying and rising. Fish stocks plummet. Coral reefs, at the bottom of a food chain on which billions depend, may be mostly gone by the time today’s third graders are old enough to vote.

Dikes and sandbags won’t hold back rising seas any more than walls can stop conflict refugees or destitute migrants. Kids need to learn that helping poor countries take climate action and provide better lives for their populations is not charity. Human survival depends on it.

World history and geopolitics were sidelined if not dropped. That old joke — war is how Americans learn geography — is no longer funny. Truth is what anyone decides it is. Fewer than half of young Americans know much about the Holocaust; many dismiss it as Jewish fake news.

Without high schools that spark interest in a rich human heritage dating back to Antiquity, universities are different today. The Department of Education reports that only 4 percent of 2020 graduates majored in English, history, philosophy, foreign languages or literature.

Voters between 18 and 30 have the most at stake in a nation at war with itself and a world facing endgame. Only 27 percent of them cast ballots in November. Understandably, many are repelled by a corrupted system. Yet if they don’t weigh in, corruption deepens.

As Arizona’s Prop 208 shows, many people with no children argue they should not pay for educating someone else’s. People without cars pay for roads. But Packer notes the larger point: “A functioning democracy needs citizens who know how to make decisions together.”

During decades of reporting, I’ve seen that schools are by far the most vital component in any country. Once-poor Asian nations thrive because governments and parents value education. But even with an ample funding, the question remains: how to do better?

The highest rated schools are in Finland, an innovative democracy bordering on a belligerent Russia. All schools are public. Rich parents who want educated children help raise standards for everyone. Students do little homework or test cramming. They learn how, not what, to think.

The advantage is obvious in America. Private schools widen rifts in a nation that already faces yawning gaps in education. As Czech writer Milan Kundera put it, societies face a constant struggle of memory over forgetting.

History matters. Watching Trump since the early 1990s, I saw a self-obsessed, bigoted blowhard capable of serious depredations. But I was reluctant to evoke Nazi extremes. After seeing his reckless disregard for human life, some parallels curl my toes.

Hitler’s playbook is standard reading for any despot. Start inculcating kids early by banning books, retelling the past and attacking “enemies of the people” who counter the party line. By the third grade, variations of the Hitler Youth are prepared to rat out their own parents.

An isolationist United States, with an antisemitic streak, took its time to join the war against Nazis. But a generous, farsighted America emerged in Europe’s ruins. It rebuilt schools. Its diplomats framed Geneva conventions and a Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Today, America’s ability to lead by example is waning fast. It is impossible to calculate how many TGTs successive U.S. administrations squander on defense budgets top heavy with waste and pork-barrel giveaways by legislators who woo their own constituencies.

The Department of Defense is aptly named. Decent democracies don’t wage war unless attacked. That is unlikely if voters choose leaders adept at diplomacy and strong military allies. Trump made America vulnerable. Biden is reversing that. No one knows what comes next.

With so much looming on the horizon, ignorance is a luxury no one can afford. Fresh generations need to know about checks and balances, the rule of law, “foreign affairs” — and the threat of self-serving false prophets. All bets are off without an awful lot of Miss Lots.