Posted on 01/21/2005 12:04:27 PM PST by hsmomx3
For years, the Propaganda Ministry of the government, government schools and left-liberal media outlets and think tanks have brainwashed Arizonans into believing that per-pupil spending is low in Arizona. Thanks to the Goldwater Institute, the Ministry's control of spending data has been ended.
By going to the URL at the end of this article, you can get total spending figures for the state as a whole and for individual schools. District data will be added soon to the site.
The average per-pupil spending in the state is $8,703 for K-3, $8,530 for grades 4-8, and $8,913 for high school. That comes to $104,411 for 12 years of education. And that whopping number excludes the additional spending on special needs students and English learners.
By comparison, it will cost my wife and me approximately $65,000 for 12 years of Catholic education for our son. Stated differently, the per-pupil cost in public schools is 54 percent higher.
When district data is added to the link, it will show that the Scottsdale district leads the state in per-pupil spending. For example, excluding special-needs students, the district spends $13,488 for each 4th grader. Yet most well-off Scottsdale parents who don't need taxpayer money to educate their kids want the district to increase spending and to float bond issues to build unneeded schools. They are either ignorant of the facts or selfishly want spending to increase because they know that other people will foot part of the bill.
Michael Harrington wrote about the latter problem in 1962: "There is the fundamental paradox of the welfare state: that it is not built for the desperate, but for those who are already capable of helping themselves."
Amazingly, state legislators and the Arizona Department of Education did not know the real spending numbers until the Goldwater Institute totaled all of the revenue sources and consolidated them in one place. Think about that: The people making decisions about education spending did not know the facts.
The Goldwater Institute deserves praise for performing this great public service, but if history is any indication, it will be lambasted by the Propaganda Ministry for publishing the facts. Anyway, here is the link:
http://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/schoolfunding/
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Mr. Cantoni is an author, columnist and founder of Honest Americans Against Legal Theft (www.haalt.org). He can be reached at ccan2@aol.com or haalt1@aol.com.
ping.
Yup. So many people oppose vouchers because they think it will put maybe $1000 in their pocket each year, and private education would cost maybe 10 times that amount -- so what's the point?. In fact, a good private education can often be found at a lower cost than a lousy government education.
And if vouchers encouraged more private school growth, the cost would go down even further.
Good for him. I really like the name of his organization.
As a single dad, I put all 4 of my kids thru private schools. I did this while paying taxes just as if the kids were in public school. It sure would have been nice to at least have gotten tax breaks to offset the private tuition I paid.
BTW, I believe that if we completely defunded public education, those students who want an education would still find a way to be educated. I also believe that if we increased public education funding a thousandfold, those students who don't want an education still won't get one.
It starts at home, regardless the amount of money being spent.
That would be so easy to sell to the public. Even the liberals I talk to have no problem letting people who homeschool or private school keep their property taxes. And when your kids are done with school your taxes resume, for now.
I think property tax should be eliminated altogether and different ways found to fund government programs.
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