20081214 Paying for Public Education

A few months ago school tax bills went out to this part of the country. Here in New York State, we spend more money per student than any other state spends but our students do not rank nearly as well as many other states. In fact, they do rather poorly. While we do not want to short change our students, New York’s standings make a strong case that blindly spending money does not equal a good education.

I, myself, am a product of New York State’s public school system. More so, I am a product of my parents being actively involved in my education from day one. They knew every teacher I had. They went to every open house. They looked at my homework. They knew who I was hanging out with. That was a bigger factor than how much was spent at the public school where we had drafty portable classrooms and broken lab equipment. In fact, the successes I have had in life came from life lessons outside of school.

My son attends a private school for a myriad of reasons. Receiving a quality education is not the least of these reasons.

I have three school tax bills, all in Rensselaer County within two school districts. Any one of those three school tax bills is just slightly less than what I pay for one year’s worth of private school. The operating budgets for those two school districts dwarfs what my son’s school has at its disposal. The amount they spend per student is many times over what my son’s school spends. Yet my son’s school has test scores well about the public school. More importantly, the graduation is statistically at one hundred percent, there is no drug problem and none of the girls are pregnant.

It may not be a real world solution, but you have to ask, wouldn’t we be better off turning the public schools over to the people who run private schools. If the children got a better education and the public’s tax burden was reduced, isn’t society better off? Isn’t that the essence of good government?

Of course, just handing over the keys to the office is not going to be the answer. As I have already stated, the conditions at the school are secondary to the framework created by the child’s home life. But as long as the classroom is geared toward the least common denominator, the chance of excellence is severely stunted.

One thing our educational system has especially failed society is in teaching students life lessons about their own finances. Most high school graduates do not understand what money is or how it works. At this moment, the citizens and government of the United States is looking around for places to put blame. Do credit card companies take advantage of users? Do mortgage companies take advantage of borrowers? Is health insurance inaccessible? Who owns the big corporations?

We have a society filled with citizens who do not know if a house is an asset or a liability? Should they buy a car or lease one? Is a time share ever a good deal?

Do the people who teach our children know the answers to these questions or do they believe that thinking about money diminishes them? Do the people on the school board know these things? Does the school’s business manager know these things?

Perhaps we need to take responsibility for our own lives and learn these things for ourselves and then pass them on to our children. But we have digressed from the primary question of this article: is there a better way to run our schools to spend money but increase the quality of the education? As a group, we consistently stress the importance of a good education, but are we willing to take a long, hard look at what that means?