Yaolee Chen

English 306

Essay Two

Maureen Newline

A Tax Exemption for the American Teachers

“A Simple One-Step Plan to Solve the Education Crisis” by J. Morton Davis asks Mr. President and Members of the 105^th Congress, to cure the abysmal state of public education by exempting teachers from federal income taxes.

Teaching would again become an economically attractive career if it carried with it an exemption from federal income taxes. The cost to the Treasury would be small, and certainly any tax money invested in teaching will return many-fold as a generation of better-educated, more productive citizens enters the work force. (Davis 55)

Professionally dedicated teachers will “impart to our children values and visions, dreams and opportunities” (55). Teaching as a career is the noblest of callings and is to be recognized both in dollars and in respect. I agree with what the author of the article has said. A respect to the teaching job is a treatment to the poverty and the unemployment for the American society today.

”[T]he economized model of reality and to recognize that we all wear not merely tinted, but tainted, glasses if we take part in the prevailing educational discourse” ( Sachs 5). To challenge the belief that a people's economic development proceeds in direct proportion to their level of educational achievement poses a threat of heresy against one of the most fundamental principles in modern secular theology. Precisely because education and development each implies a process resulting in some form of favorable change, we may properly speak of them as separate values. However, whereas education has a history of conceptual evolution separate from that of development, their evolutionary paths have since merged and congealed into one of the great and sacred certainties of our era. Nowhere, perhaps, has this belief taken stronger hold than in the United States, where the educational reform initiatives of the 1980s and 1990s have now elevated this belief to canonical status. The tax exemption is a way to honor our teachers that they are performing a godly job in our society. If we don’t treat our teachers well, the whole American society is going to be wrong.

The poverty and the uneducated are the two major problems for the residents who live in downtown LA today. “[T]he black-male jobless rate in some residential areas of South Central Los Angeles hovers around 50 %” (Chan 478). The Los Angeles Unified School District as a whole, 39.2% of all the students in the class of 1988 dropped out in their high-school years. The drop out rates in South Central Los Angeles was substantially higher, between 63% and 79%. And 25% of the students in the junior high schools in South Central Los Angeles dropped out during the 1987-1988. Because of the increasing drop out rates in school, the residents of the downtown LA had become less educated. And because of the modern computer science and the international trades require, less and less job opportunities are available for the unskilled or uneducated youth. An article says “25% of prime-working-age young black males (ages 18-35) are either in prison, in jail, on probation, or otherwise connected to the criminal-justice system” (The Jury Is Still Out) Because of the poverty, unemployment, and the failure of the educational system, the city dwellers faces an crisis in downtown LA—a crisis that can not be healed without the talking about the education.

The American wealthy people are not going to talk about the education. The South Commission study closes with a call for a "new world order" that will respond to "the South's plea for justice, equity, and democracy in the global society". The rulers of that society, adhere to quite a different conception of world order. "The government of the world must be entrusted to the satisfied nations," the "rich men dwelling at peace within their habitations" whose power places them "above the rest," not the "hungry nations" who "seek more" and hence endanger tranquility (Chomsay 139-151). The global rulers can hardly be expected to heed the pleas of the South, any more than rights were granted to the general population, as a gift from above, within the rich societies themselves. Those assigned the status of spectators from below can afford no illusions on these matters. The poor is still poor, though the price of real estate has increased 15 to 20 times since the World War II in downtown LA. We cannot expect the rich to do the educational reform; therefore, it is the responsibility of the federal government to pay the teachers more.

The teachers of the US are the leaders of the US economy. First, the role and reform of U.S. public schools reflect an essentially economic view of the world. Worldview reduces the value of everything to a measure of economic utility. Education is the only valuable to the extent that it services an economic imperative. Second, education or educational reform conducted under an economized worldview will only intensify the nefarious effects of the colonial relations of political, cultural, and economic domination that it breeds at home and abroad. The organization of school curriculum privileges those disciplines deemed most central to market expansion (e.g., math and science), and the political centrality of the economic sphere influences the nature of the knowledge presented in specific content areas. From the general education to the vocational training, the teachers play an important role in the US economic prosperity.

One does not separate the economic from the cultural, political, spiritual, moral, and natural spheres of human experience. Language, for example, advances human thought and benefits the US international trades, which goes beyond the educational visions and practices. A review to the reality of the rich who live in the South and to recognize what the government can do for the poor who live in the urban area. The simply giving the tax exemption to the teachers can do the American economic reform in downtown LA.

Works Cited

Chomsky, N. “World orders: Old and new”. Facing the challenge: Responses

to the report of the south commission. England: ZED books. 1990.

Davis, J. Morton. “A simple one-step Plan to Slove the Education Crisis:

A message to the President and the Congress”. Quoted in Writing and

Reading Across the Curriculum ed. by Laurence Behrens and Leonard F.

Rosen. New York: Longman. 2003.

“The Jury Is Still Out,” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 10, 1995.

Sachs, W. The development dictionary: A guide to knowledge as power.

Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Zed Books.1992