20 kids' worth of parents can afford to employ a teacher at a very attractive rate for both parties I suspect.
This is why actual private schools in the US require strong institutional backing (i.e. a church willing to subsidize them to the tune of millions) or effort commensurate with opening a new factory rather than a new salon.
The Supreme Court declared in 1925 (Pierce v. Society of Sisters) that parents have the right to send their children to a private or religious school, and upheld in 1972 (Wisconsin v. Yoder) that parents could even get religious exemptions to state compulsory-attendance laws.
That lets them afford a staff to do things like, e.g., keep immunization records and shuffle them around when students transfer. If they didn't, they would be shut down. One issue down, seventy two to go.
I am not seeing how this makes my contentions false.
I don’t have a breakdown of my particular school’s budget, but a sample budget for a Jewish day school (http://www.peje.org/docs/samplebudget.pdf) estimates that about two-thirds of a school’s expenditures are going to be for personnel, and about a third of the personnel expenditures are going to be for administrative staff. I really don’t think my school spends $500K a year paying someone to shuffle immunization records around.
But to delve a little deeper: in California, nearly every municipality of any size requires a special-use permit or conditional use permit (CUP) to build a school. There is no "school" zoning code. Almost never are such permits granted in industrial use areas, despite sometimes being locations that might have little to no risk. That means the school functionally has to get a CUP in a residential zone. Which residents often don't like because, even for a small school, it means a substantial increase in traffic. This is doubly difficult because not only does the school have to fight to receive zoning, but trivial-to-place legal challenges can lead to a huge expense. For instance, challenging zoning for environmental reasons is nearly trivial but an extended environmental impact report alone can cost millions of dollars.
So there's a substantial risk involved in the launch without any option for a quick buyout. Remember, these are almost all 501(c)(3) institutions (I don't know of any that aren't, but I could imagine there are).
The public schools I grew up with in the American midwest (all lower middle class) were uniformly good but this was 50 years ago when such schools were widely funded by local sources (e.g., property taxes from the community), did not have to account to the distant bureaucracies or have to focus on prepping kids to meet minimum proficiency tests by which educational results could be measured with mirrors, and did not have to deal with unions whose goals seem to be as much about promoting the interests of their members via ever-expansive forms of public funding as they are about helping kids learn. The public high schools I attended in California in the late 1960s were also good, and it was naturally expected in that day that the vast majority of the kids would not only graduate but would also be literate and reasonably taught once they did so - there too, all funding was purely local.
The key is to have the schools, whether public or private, in the hands of people who care really care about what the kids learn and that means local people who know them and know their families. This element has largely been lost in modern America's public schools, and it is a real tragedy.
It is nice to see the resourcefulness of parents who seek to overcome the resulting mess but this is a struggle that is often just plain desperate in light of the overwhelming problems that now beset the public schools. This piece reminds us that there is always hope where people really care.
This is really the only significant part of the equation. The system is basically designed to fail. You pass a tax levy for X mills, which brings in X amount of money for the school system, and never a dollar more. Property values go up, but property taxes do not. The budget therefore shrinks every year due to inflation, and every 10-15 years the situation gets so dire that the district has to put a ballot issue up for a tax "increase" to get funding back up to the levels of 10-15 years ago.
In most areas of the Midwest, this poor voter understanding of how schools are funded has resulted in a steady decline in school expenditures, even as actual costs of education have outpaced inflation.
http://www.mnhs.org/library/tips/history_topics/18public.htm...
In Massachusetts, there's a cap of 2.5% for property tax increases without a ballot measure. This means that almost every year, local budgets are shrinking relative to inflation.
You know what the most common complaint I heard was when these issues went to ballot? "Screw those councilmen, they want to raise our taxes so they're holding these services hostage." What's the phrase about it being impossible to make people understand something that they don't want to?
Doesn't MA reassess on transfer? CA does, so property tax revenues grow faster than the cap.
Note that CA also does "catchup" - the bill goes up by the cap whenever the difference between the assessed and real value is greater than the cap, no matter what's happened to the real value. That's why property tax bill is going up this by the cap year even though the value of my house took a 30% hit last year. It's the same for anyone who has owned for more than 5 years.
Note that housing inflation has been more than other inflation, so trailing housing inflation doesn't imply that the local govt is losing ground.
> "Screw those councilmen, they want to raise our taxes so they're holding these services hostage."
Since that's how govts actually behave....
Look at what they do and don't threaten to cut and ask yourself if those are rational priorities. Or, do those two lists tell you that they're using the "cut" list to keep funding for the "don't cut" list.
Note - you have to look at both lists, not just the "cut" list. And you have to look at the amounts for the various items.
There was no money. It was a choice between raising taxes or cutting services.
And people like you respond to that with "You're such jerks for holding our services hostage!"
Arithmetic is not a jerk. It's just a fact. Whatever happened to personal responsibility?
RE: the percentages, the deal is that the total local property tax take goes up by 2.5% a year. If your property increases in assessed value, you might see personal increase of more than that but someone else saw an increase of less to make up for it.
0 money? Really? I'll bet that it was really just not enough to pay for what the pols wanted to do.
If the latter, they could fund some services. That's why I said to look at what they protected and what they said that they'd cut if they didn't get more money.
If you do that, you'll discover that they're protecting some things that should have a lower priority than things that they put on the "cut" list.
> And people like you respond to that with "You're such jerks for holding our services hostage!"
Since they're saying that they don't have enough money for police and fire protection but do for lesser things, why is it wrong to characterize that as "holding our services hostage"? What is an acceptable way to criticise that behavior?
Or, are you claiming that they should always get enough money for whatever they want?
> Arithmetic is not a jerk. It's just a fact.
Yup, it's a fact. If you have $100 and what you want costs $200, you need to scale back your wants.
The "jerk" behavior is to spend the $100 on lower priorities and whine that you don't have enough money to pay for higher priorities.
> Whatever happened to personal responsibility?
Huh? The fact that some govt wants to do something does not obligate me to pay for it.
It was simple arithmetic, a choice between letting teachers go or raising taxes.
What many people did for selfish reasons, and you're doing for ideological purity reasons, is attempt to change the debate to some abstract notion of "government spending my money". Hey buddy, it's your kids in the schools, and you even get to vote on the tax increase. Just don't call me a jerk or a liar -- I'm giving it to you straight.
Quote anamax : The "jerk" behavior is to spend the $100 on lower priorities and whine that you don't have enough money to pay for higher priorities.
Which lower priorities was I wasting money on here, exactly? You're the expert. And I'm sure there weren't any state or federal mandates involved, legal obligations or anything like that. "jerk" behavior is refusing to educate yourself on things and hand-waving away instead so you can keep your nice simple universe. Mental shortcuts will always lead to uninformed opinions.
Somehow I doubt that teacher salaries were your only expense. I doubt that teacher salaries were even your only not-mandated expense. (As to "mandated", I've found that some of the "mandates" are an excuse. Yes, I've done this exercise before.)
A 20% reduction in income can be painful, but in a world where lots of people are taking a bigger hit....
Your tax base took a hit because people took a huge hit, yet for some reason you think that teachers should be spared. Other folks take a pay cut and lose jobs, but ....
Which reminds me, do those teachers have defined benefit pensions? Are they fully funded? Few folks in the private sector have such pensions and none of them have taxpayer guarantees.
And yes, I noticed that you ducked my questions about budget components. As I wrote, I've gone through this before.
You're still doing it here. Did you read my earlier comments about how the property tax is assessed and collected? If you had, you wouldn't be talking about how the tax base took a "hit".
You claimed that you didn't have enough money to pay teachers. There are three ways to get into that situation.
(1) The amount of money that you're paying teachers (as a whole) has gone up. (2) You have less money than you had last year.
(1) is dumb unless you have more money coming in, which leaves (2). Should I have assumed dumb?
> Did you read my earlier comments about how the property tax is assessed and collected?
Yes, I did. The total amount of property tax collected can go down if the total assessed value of property goes down. Of course, not all of that property tax revenue goes for teacher salaries, so it's possible for the teacher salary budget to go down when the property tax revenues don't change.
Anad that gets us back to priorities. When total tax revenues go down (or new spending comes in that exceeds new revenues), govts make two lists - things that they threaten to cut and things that they don't threaten to cut. The composition of those two lists tells you want they think is valuable.
If your "teacher salary budget" got cut, it's because something else didn't get cut. Why do I keep saying that? Because property tax revenues pay for more than just teacher salaries.
A) (perception), unions are more concerned with benefits for their members than educating their kids. Uh... so? Who else is going to advocate for them? They have to eat too, and every small town in America trots out a bunch of reaganish bullcrap about how the school system should be able to do more with less but they all expect a raise in their private sector job if they're doing well. We drop our kids off at school for the day, drive to work on clean, safe streets, and then bitch about how the public sector employees should get by with no yearly raise, without even bothering to inform ourselves about our local budget.
B) (reality) Unions are oftentimes more concerned with the preservation of power, access and position for the top union officials than they are with either the benefits for their members or the quality of education, except for cases where the latter two feed into the first (fortunately, fairly often). This is how it actually works. Unions have their problems but it's not because the teachers are greedy -- teachers are already doing a difficult job for low pay, presumably because they care about education. Anyone who whines about unions or about teachers expecting a fair pay check is free to try it for a few years - last I checked there's a huge shortage of qualified math and science teachers.
This could be because of bad teachers, bad parents, stupid/unteachable children, etc, but the unions' only solution is always "more money." Is it unreasonable to think, then, that the unions are acting in bad faith? The teachers are the only ones who get to elect the union leaders so they are responsible, directly or indirectly.
There's a huge shortage of qualified teachers because of the nonsense teachers ed requirements for certifying teachers. You've probably seen many articles on how ridiculous and shoddy these curricula are. These requirements exist at the behest of the unions to protect their members from competition.
> The four smart women were resourceful. Moving from the beautiful castle-like school building at Wroxeter they found they were in need of basic furniture for classrooms and bartered for desks and chairs with local schools. They were conscious of fiscal needs and worked with generous families to administer the school’s financial resources.
> They wrote curriculum, taught classes and worked with their faculty to lay the groundwork for the individualized curriculum and the active learning philosophy Chesapeake Academy champions today. The four smart women were visionary. They embraced technology as an educational resource, while Apple® computer company was just finding its' way into the school marketplace.
http://www.chesapeakeacademy.com/podium/default.aspx?t=10367...
Patricia Troy is the mother of Dave Troy, a local entrepreneur, and she did exactly what you're proposing.