A Patch story caught my eye, and a light bulb went off. All those gazillions of dollars we’ve wasted on public education when we could have been cherishing seminaries, literature, or science.
If you recall, the justification for state-managed gambling was that we’d be investing in public schools. Without looking at how much more expensive those schools are and how much lower the assessments are since we set foot on that path.
It’s not pretty. A lot fewer students, a lot more money per student, way too much per student for admin costs, and reading and math scores have declined. In some districts, you’d be hard-pressed to call it a school. Not one focused on traditional education or fundamentals. So, I had a thought.
How about the legislature tie lottery cash to achievement? And not just in public schools. Charters, private, home school, hybrid. Whoever can teach kids to read and write, learn to debate, and grasp some basic civics gets a shot at a check. We could even make it more interesting and have a lottery.
In the Hunger Games, every year your name goes in again, so the longer you live, up to a certain age, the greater the odds you’ll get picked. For the education lottery, you have to do better than 80% of a good standard for assessment, which goes up a little bit every few years. The better you do, the more times you get entered. Winners would have to use the money to reduce tuition costs, pay for improvements (not payroll or admin), and with open enrollment on the table, the people doing the best job will attract more “paying” students.
Or something like that.
Liberals love to fix costs but never education. What if competition demonstrated that the number is 5-7K per kid per year?
I’m sure someone will “F” up whatever happens, so perhaps we ought to simplify the process. If you can’t teach 8 out of ten kids in a classroom to read, write, and do math at grade level or better, parents can use the money for legal support to fight the superintendent and ed unions on the next contract negotiation.
Yeah, I’m just making these up as they come to me. How do I really feel? Sell off all the Ed assets in every town to third parties who can do it better for a third of the current cost or less. Take the public out of education. There’s no constitutional obligation, so just cut the cord. And how bad would that be?
That 28.6 million in lottery gimme’s is getting wasted, and if we’re going to pretend to justify legalized gambling to fund education, we should change that to learning, and I don’t mean learning how to waste money on a half-assed attempt at education.
I hear roads and bridges could use the cash. Municipalities that have to give up stuff for police and fire because the bloated public schools suck all the budget oxygen off the ballot every damn year.
The property tax problem is a result of goose-stepping progressive public education fascism.
Almost every local issue is resolved by ending the failed experiment and using that money for almost anything else, and the only thing stopping us is a paradigm that thinks $20-30K per year per kid (and rising) for a daycare (with sports and music) that is holding most of our kids back or making them hate learning, is the best we can hope to do.
Lots of parents are doing exponentially better at a fraction of the cost. Their kids will be the leaders of the future. Their kids will create future generations, and they won’t be sending them to government schools. We could pull the plug on school boards at every level and make this a line-item in the town budget, if even that. Selectman would measure the output, compare it to the inputs, and report to voters. The property tax burden would collapse. Seniors wouldn’t lose their homes. Parents would control learning directly with their money and their feet, and despite whatever everyone with a financial stake in the failed system says, we’d end up with more well-balanced, well-educated citizens to carry the great gift of the American dream forward.
Besides.
The entire Democrat-socialist political experiment is based on the notion that you have to tear down every system and institution to its foundation, dig up that foundation, after which there will be no government, only free and equal citizens living in a workers’ paradise. Ask Democrats why we shouldn’t do that to schools first. You know. As a test.
The Public Ed experiment has failed. It is a political laundromat wasting money, ruining minds, and creating a mental health crisis (that adds even more costs). Let’s tear that down to the foundation, dig that up, set taxpayers, students, and real educators free, and see what sort of learning utopia they come up with.
It begins with unplugging the ATMs. Stop giving them more money, then stop giving them money, period.
Parents will find a more affordable way to teach their kids, and the free market will compete to get a piece of that.
Then stop giving public money to universities.
