The existence of fraud in a system is not a reason to shut down the system. It is a reason to investigate and hold accountable those responsible. There are bad actors in every system. But there are also thousands of families that cannot afford childcare while the parents work, or to put food on the table. Perhaps they are not all without fault, but that doesn't change the fact that the kids have no dinner or no one to watch them while their mom goes to work at the grocery store etc. There's fraud in the tax system, should we shut that down? I agree the fraudsters should be held accountable, cut off, and punished but such is not always the case. There's a man from New York who was convicted of 34 counts of fraud, and someone decided to elect him president...
Hello; I will leave the blatant politics & TDS alone and will respond to the business-as-usual portion of the post.
I worked in the public schools of three states in a 33-year career. Sometime after i graduated from high school in 1965 a thing called social promotion came to my attention. Several rationalizations where commonly used to justify promoting students who had not achieved expected learning skills. Perhaps the more common was there would be a social stigma for an individual after being held back grades. There were others to be sure.
The result is and has been for a very long-time students "graduating" from high school while being functionally illiterate. Lacking basic math and reading skills among others. In my first year or few I kept expecting some responsible authority to come in and put a stop to what was clearly wrong with the system. Such did not happen.
What did happen every seven to ten years was a new study (investigation) followed by a new way of approaching standards of education. Some key points include that when a new program was started it was to be considered "ground zero". Then in a few years the new system would be evaluated to compare results to the ground-zero start year. Then many hands would be wrung and demands something be done because the new system had not worked. The cycle repeated. Happened I think three times in my years. Of course, the new programs managed to miss the real problems including such as social promotion every time. The bosses in the school systems never seemed to be held responsible for abject failures of the systems they fostered.
As was predicted some days ago by a talking head on TV and some decades ago by a fellow i know. Frame a program around some "feel-good" thing and it will be much easier to rip off that program. Such include feeding children, now day care, and such. A few years ago, when this site was less biased and prone to censorship, we had a lively discussion about one of the very well-known animal saving organizations. What a member revealed was most of the funds raised did not go to saving animals. Went to ads and a lavish lifestyle for the organization. That discussion ought to be in the archives of this site.
As it turns out the fraud in the state with the greatest focus currently was reported by whistle blowers and legislators perhaps as much as ten years ago. Such is why I labeled your comment about investigation as part of a business as is usual failed approach.
I do suspect the basic act of cutting off funds from these fraud ridden programs will move things along quickly. If as you contend there are honest day care centers, those will be allowed to continue. Same for other feel-good programs. The idea is not to stop legit childcare nor legit feed the children programs but to stop the fraud.
I revert to my opening comment about social promotion in schools. Surely promoting a child who cannot function at grade level prevents that child from stigma or embarrassment at the time, but what about the harm to the individual as an adult? Often enough it is not that the child is too dumb to learn but that the school system allows them to choose to not try, then pushes them along. They wind up as adults without important skills. I know which winds up being worse.
An important thing often omitted from these discussions is the national debt the USA now faces. We now face around a trillion of added debt every 100 days or so. Not a penny of principal is paid on the debt, but we now pay more on the interest each year than on the Department of War. Something like a trillion and more. A kill the golden goose situation.
Ther is more but enough for now.
