Antonis Christodoulou Takes on Pete Aguilar | Full Interview [24:32-28:49]

due to bureaucracy mismanagement. That mismanagement within bureaucracies is the reason why public schools are failing. And it's not about a funding issue. How would you respond to critics who say there's already enough funding? It's about bureaucracy mismanagement. That's the real issue. I think both are true. I think actually both are true. To talk about the funding first, what we need is to make sure our teachers are paid a livable wage where they don't have to go into their own paychecks to then fund their schools by pencils, by a bunch of different things for their school to allow students to actually be able to learn. So I had teachers who would always talk about how they had to go into their own paycheck and do these things. And that is not how a society should work. That is not how we educate our youth. That is not how we go forward and make sure kids have the best opportunities and can thrive in schooling. So currently in California, they were prepping, during pandemic, we had a surplus. And they ended up allocating quite a bit of money right now. There's not some schools have had actually to fire some school districts have fired and laid off many teachers and many counselors. For example, Peter Aguilar's district where he was mayor, they at the same month that he was trying, he was voting to give $3.3 billion to Israel and giving police departments in the area of a million dollars each so they can buy Israeli surveillance technology. His own, his own city that he was mayor of was was laying off 138 teachers. This is a funding issue too because our federal government has a signal that they don't want the, they don't want public education. They've been moving a lot of our funding for public schools and allowing teachers and allowing people to then transfer that to private schools. So we're also funding private schools and then we are judging public schools by the fact of we're giving them less and less money because we're also funding private schools the amount that the public schools should receive. And in no way am I saying that we shouldn't support private schools, but we also need to make sure our public system works. In the private sector, we see a lot of industries where there's a public option. There's some type of government work that is going on. And then what happens is we defund that system. Republicans are trying to do that with our social security. Republicans are trying to do that with Medicare, Medicaid, everything. They're trying to lower these services so they are unusable. We see this with the with the crimp with the big beautiful bill where they are making it hard to stay on ebt and snap because they're making sure that you have to file repeatedly every week everything and then if you miss one time, then you're off of these funding. When we say that bureaucracy doesn't work, we need to consider does it work because our politicians don't want it to and they want a profit incentive for the private investors that want to come in and then create that private option or does it not work because we're not funding a problem or does it not work because we're not putting care into it. And are we not doing the right results because we're not doing it properly. I think both are very true in our country right now. And that is something that we need to focus on. And that's something I would stand up and say every day on the house that we need to make sure that we are not funding wars, we're not funding the bombing of schools in foreign countries when we have schools where kids go hungry. When we ended up giving students a free lunch during the pandemic, we erased a lot of childhood childhood hunger and it improved lives, improved a lot of things. And when we gave student tax credits, that also improved lives and then that decreased childhood poverty rates. So there's a lot our government can do if they have the will to do it that would improve the material conditions of everyone in this country in the education field sphere too. And we just need politicians who are willing to do this. And I don't think the current Democratic Party cares or has the has the will to do any of this. And that is why I'm running too.