Here’s a thought experiment for you to try.
Imagine that you meet with your employer to tell him all the things you want to buy, and how much money you’d need to be able to pay for them. You tell him that you think you should get paid whatever amount would be needed to make that possible, regardless of the actual value that you’ve been able to provide to the business.
How do you think that would go?
That’s just not how things work, is it? Your employer figures out how much value you provide, and how much he can afford to pay you. Then you figure out how to get by on that amount. You use it to pay for things that are necessary, and get by without some things that are merely desirable. That is, you focus primarily on your must dos, and secondarily on your want tos.
The rising cost of public schools has been a problem for a long time, but it seems to me that in recent months, discussions about it have less often been about how schools are too expensive, and more often been about how they are no longer affordable.
As Hillary Clinton might say, it takes a school to bankrupt a village.
But there is a simple way to make schools more affordable. Taxpayers would say up front what they can afford; and then district officials figure out how to set priorities so that they can do the best job possible for that amount.
You know, the way things work in the rest of the world.
The way it works now, the districts say what they want, presenting a list of line items that are not prioritized. Then the taxpayers try to trim that figure, usually without any real success. This encourages the districts to ask for the moon; and sets up a toxic situation where parents and the people who make a living from the public school system will shame, denigrate, shout down, and ultimately try to shut up anyone who thinks that might be excessive.
As a result, the people who merely want to protect their property are unwilling to put up with the abuse heaped on them by the people who desperately want to protect their subsidies. So the former stay home, the latter control the process by default, and the subsidies ratchet ever upwards.
The way it should work is that first, the taxpayers would come up with a figure for what they feel they can afford, without being shown the district’s wish list; and only after that would the districts figure out how to do the best they can with that amount.
(Taxpayers to district: “History, experience, and common sense tell us that it should be possible to teach kids to read and do math for an average of $12,000 per student per year, including special education. And that’s what we can afford without enduring undue hardship. So draw up your budget, based on that amount, prioritizing those things — putting fundamentals before incidentals — and make it work.”)
All of which is to say, our process for funding schools is exactly backwards. And when you set up processes that are backwards, it should be no surprise when they produce results that are upside-down — where we pay more each year to give fewer kids a crappier education.
