If college should be free, then colleges should offer education for the low, low price of zero dollars. If health care is a right, then doctors and nurses should work for nothing. But you can’t do that? How will they pay for the stuff they need to do the work, even if it’s free? My response? Why do I have to pay for a service I don’t need until I need it, and what if I never need it?
Summary:
- Paradigm Shifts
- Failed Education Models
- Some property tax math
- Trump Admin Higher Ed Changes set the right tone
- More money = worse outcomes
- Returning value to public education
- Shouldn’t wealthy politicians step off their piles of gold and give first and most?
Before government interfered, education and health care were managed almost entirely by private interests funded by wealthy benefactors. If I recall correctly, they were more affordable and produced significantly better outcomes as well.
Take Education.
Since the government advanced its monopoly position and the Democrat party found a financial and political interest in it, K-12 education has become unaffordable while consistently delivering substandard results. It hates competition, and it should.
Charter Schools, which in my state are all public schools (read that again), require about a third of the per-student cost of (the traditional) public schools on the street (sometimes less), and produce remarkably better results. If you think property taxes are a problem, you’re not looking at the right problem. If you had 1500 students costing you 31.5 million a year regardless of grade level or results, you could cut that to $ 10.5 million if you sent all those kids to the public charter school instead.
You just saved 21 million every single year. Larger districts would save even more. My town just approved $90+ million for 4,000 students, give or take. Using the same formula, we’d cut annual school costs by $62 million.
The school portion of your property tax bill drops to one third of what it was, saving you a small fortune every year, while freeing up resources for the typically starved municipal side of most small-to-mid-sized town budgets.
I’d say keep it, but if you care, plenty of money for roads and bridges with a lot left over for dining out, recreational activities, and private savings and investment. And you get smarter, more well-prepared graduates.
So, why are some public schools one-third the cost with better outcomes like public (or private) charter schools?
No teachers’ unions.
No top-heavy administrative staff.
They tend to focus on academics instead of all the community center crap that has ballooned payrolls in the other public schools.
By design, they are often subject-focused for kids who show promise or aptitude for certain areas of study and provide the other basics without the fluff and nonsense you get from bloated public school curriculum. And the outputs are superior, much like with lower-cost private schools and other education options.
Fixing the system could mean ending any mandatory education property tax, which is a huge paradigm shift from the sheep-like expectation we’ve been programmed to accept.
And while there is a public interest, we need to rethink it at the very least, which brings me to this tidbit.
According to PBS, what’s left of the Department of Education is rolling out a new accountability test for colleges called, simply, the “do no harm” test. The concept is so straightforward it probably gave several university administrators a spontaneous eye-twitch: If graduates from an undergraduate program don’t earn more money than people who never went to college at all, that program gets cut off from federal student loans.
I’d like the government completely out of this racket, but this is a step in the right direction. Taxpayers will no longer be asked to backstop student loans for things that do not produce enough value for the person who took out the loan to pay it off.
The Trump Administration is finally forcing educational bureaucrats to admit that maybe, just maybe, borrowing $150,000 to get a degree in 14th-Century Early Transgenderism doesn’t make financial sense if your post-graduation career plan involves asking people if they want you to leave room for cream.
You can still pursue a degree wherever it is offered; you just have to go get your own loan and assume the risk. This puts the onus on parents or students to pursue goals that lead to occupations that earn enough to pay off the cost of the learning.
Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent said, “If a program cannot show that it leaves its graduates financially better off than if they had never enrolled, it should not be underwritten by federal taxpayers.”
Notice that phrase: federal taxpayers. Not “free college.” Because there is no such thing as “free college.” There is only “college paid for by other people who didn’t get to go to college, because they were busy working to pay for your college.” Every time a politician promises “free college,” what they actually mean is, “We are going to take money from the guy who fixes your plumbing and give it to the university so they can build a new diversity center with its own rock-climbing wall.”
This is what you voted for, and the same thinking needs to trickle down (more like an avalanche) to alter the paradigm of local schools and funding.
There is a relationship between money and learning. The more money you give to public schools, the worse the student outcomes will be. Every year it’s tried.
The problem is too much money in all the wrong places.
You can get better outcomes at public charter schools for a fraction of the price.
There are non-public charter schools (in other states), private schools, home-school collectives, and other options that, at a third to a quarter of the cost per student, turn out kids who can read and do math above grade level, with a school day that is anywhere from a third to half as long.
Until you break the paradigm and just say no, with receipts, that monopoly will keep robbing you for a progressive jobs program whose product is a) donations to the politicians who enable it and b) less capable kids, ill-prepared not just for college but for everything else.
No one is saying there is no public interest in fallback funding for K-12, but the current monopoly is selling you a lie at three times the cost.
The price of K-12 education could drop like a stone, and the quality would rise – the exact opposite of the current trajectory of the failed system they are using to bankrupt you to crank out increasingly less educated kids.
Treat education like any other PURCHASE, commodity, or investment, vote accordingly, and the system will have to change to compete. If you don’t, it will just take more from you and give you less back year after year until you are broke or forced to leave town, assuming they haven’t taken your house for being unable to pay too much for too little.
