Posted on 12/11/2003 7:11:53 AM PST by NormsRevenge
Edited on 04/12/2004 6:02:02 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's top education adviser is calling for a complete and dramatic overhaul of the way California pays for public schools.
Education Secretary Richard Riordan said Wednesday that in light of The Bee's recent investigation of school financing, the new Republican administration is expanding its proposals for education reform to include a new kind of student funding formula.
(Excerpt) Read more at sacbee.com ...
Great, the worse a school does, the money they will get. Why doesn't Ar-nold at least create a pilot school choice program...
To each according to their need. Isn't that, along with the progressive income tax, what the country was founded on?
These already exist throughout the state, under the Davis mentality.
Okay, here's an idea: Legalize "Right To Work" choice in the employment of school teachers. Abolish the "Forced Unionism" of public sector Teachers! Then, quality would return to California Education.
When you have "Forced Union" school-teachers instructing your children everyday, it is impossible to have "quality education". All you ever get is the "Forced Unionist" party line, indoctrinated under the cover of "Education".
But, do you think Riordan (married to a Democratic Party Forced Unionist symapthizer) and Swartzenegger (married to a Democratic Party Forced Unionist sympathizer) will ever even mention this?
As Steve Tyler sings: "Dream on!"
Coming from an old Artillery Officer that some suspect may not be all there, so to speak, this is quite a statement.. And You see it in the Sac Bee and now here at FR. :-o
Translation - It might upset the apple cart and disturb all the worms & maggots in the process.
Good! This is long overdue. The failures of public education -- with all of its guaranteed funding -- is the biggest scandal in state government, and yet it's been the biggest sacred cow. We homeschooled all three of our kids, each of whom is now in college, mainly because the schools in our small town are rotten. The dominance of such academic fantasies as "look-say" for reading, and "guess-and-check" for math have resulted in a growing number of illiterate kids not able to figure out the simplest math problem.
As I stated on a similar thread yesterday, I'll all in favor of ending public education as we know it, give parents $2000 a year per child in their family to pay for whatever education they want, and then spend the rest of the money that goes to education on the state's roads.
Paying for Schools: A series on how California pays for its schools
Over the course of a year, The Sacramento Bee has looked deeply into how public schools are paid for in California. In three segments of "Paying for Schools," published during 2003, reporter Deb Kollars peeled back the layers of such little understood funding categories as categoricals, mandates and revenue limits. What she found was a system rife with problems.
The first segment, published in February, investigated the $12 billion spent on categorical funding - a complex web of more than 100 programs ranging from gifted and talented education to dropout prevention - much of which is distributed based on politics and outdated formulas.
In May, the second stories ran on state mandates, through which schools get extra money for such routine things as teaching the Gettysburg Address and preparing for earthquakes. They have cost the state about $1 billion in the past five years.
In the final segment, on the basic underlying money schools get to educate each child, California has managed to turn a $29 billion responsibility for basic school funding into yet another obstacle course of inequities.
Dow over 10,000 close!
Wells on CNBC about to talk about California Credit and The Governator is laying it on the line for the California Legislators!
Got my recorder going for her statement.
Republicans closed the Assembly (recess) to caucus.
Moody's is putting the pressure on California!
Here's my best offer. It requires a short field trip.
Endeavoring to illustrate waste in the present system and the chief causes of the waste is logical but to quantify the waste is diificult. It is difficult because the education budget is an interactive melange of a multitude of funding sources that share one thing in common. They exist as the result of the classification of people and the ensuing attempt to benefit only that class. Beyong that they are an unorganized, overlapping, duplicitous collection of accounting nightmares and no matter the amount of charts and graphs, it will be diificult to clarify the waste to the average Freeper. A similar experience would be attempting to count the debris in the Missippippi river passing one point after a torrential rain. It would simply go on and on and on.
I would suggest a simpler comparison. Pick a school and a district, a modest sized high school near you in a modest sized district and determine the administrative cost of that school/district, in dollars. per pupil, anywhere between 1959 to 1963 as compared to 2002. The 2002 budget breakdowns, both the state's administrative share and the district's administrative share are available from the Department of Education website. Now the field trip.
Take a short trip to that same district's office and ask to see a copy of the school's budget (1959-1963). If preunification, simply ask for the budget of that particular high school. If post unification, ask for the district budget and use it instead. During the comparison, of both budgets, simply assume that federal aid carries a 10% administrative expense
Remember you'er comparing administartive costs per student, not total expenses per student. The results will probably not surprise you.
Was that a subtle jab at carry_okie, by the way.. errr, never mind. LOL ;-)
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