Eternal Vigilance!

[Opsa]

I heartily agree with Scrib, Stelli and Griffin on the subject of tax-funded public education. It is a necessity. Without it you get a bunch of uneducated people who may or may not be willing to be worker bees. It's the ones that are not willing that are dangerous. An intelligent person who is not educated is the kind of person who may choose to go into professional crime. To support public education is to support a civilized community.

An education that includes the arts teaches empathy, communication, and cooperation. Surely these are qualities we want to see refined in all people, regardless of whether or not they can afford a private education.

[Scriblerus the Philosophe]

I've paid a bit into social security. It's not actually being put away for me as it is paying for current users, and it's not going to be there when I'm old/disabled enough to collect. Yet I don't mind paying, because I know people who need it benefit. IMO, it's the same thing with school taxes. You aren't using it, sure, but you're helping the neighbor kids (people you actually see and interact with; I have no idea who my money went to support).

You're welcome to your opinion, of course, but that doesn't excuse the system break down (and imo, excuse your taxes). And again, you still benefit from it, if indirectly. Also, your choice to educate your daughter elsewhere is *your* choice, which imo does not mean you get to not pay taxes that fund local schools. Just because you choose to send your girl to a private school doesn't mean the kids in your neighborhood should suffer.

Scribe,

people move in and out of neighborhoods, cities and states all the time...

I don't see schools closing down because of that...

Taxes are imposed for services to the public...
example: you do not have to pay for city sewer taxes if you have a property outside of city limits that is not hooked into the city systems.

you do not pay for services you do not use... this is the only case you do

You're comparing tomatoes and rocks, so to speak. Both are round, neither are sentient, but that's where the similarities stop. Moving is much different than totally removing yourself from the system because you aren't (currently) using it, because moving generally implies that someone is going to take the original resident's place and therefore pay the property taxes that fund the school. Removing yourself from the system means you're still there, but aren't putting in (and therefore depriving schools of much-needed money).



You said you put mini!Stelli into private school because she's doing better there, yes? Is it because the class sizes are small enough that teachers can pay more attention to her? Is the quality of instruction all-around better than in the public system? Better, more up-to-date books?
Did you ever wonder why the public school couldn't offer her that?

[Aggie]

* _{in fact pensioners taxes pay for loads of stuff they cannot make any use of........}

Pensioners tend to have used most of it at some point in their lives....!

[stellinacadente]

You said you put mini!Stelli into private school because she's doing better there, yes? Is it because the class sizes are small enough that teachers can pay more attention to her? Is the quality of instruction all-around better than in the public system? Better, more up-to-date books?
Did you ever wonder why the public school couldn't offer her that?

No. I put mini-Stelli in private school to avoid the Bible harassment.
Because I want her to be a free thinker and because the Montessori method is something I believe in.

one year in public school and she could hardly read
6 months at Montessori and she reads chapter books

more money to schools? not sure about it because of the use they make of it it's not necessarily productive for the children and the money just never seems enough...
on top of the taxes there is the almost weekly charity case for t he school...

I wonder what would happen if we half the Military budget and give the other half to education...

[Opsa]

...or better yet, let's halve the salaries of the Senators and Congresspeople. That way we'd get the greedy people out of there and get some people who might help govern for better reasons, like helping the country.

I understand about not wanting the Xtian rhetoric, and wanting the Montessori method. I'd send my kid to a better school if I could afford it, but I can't, so I appreciate your tax dollars spent on eduction, for what it's worth.

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

My son has benefited greatly from public schools; now, I live in an upper middle class part of town, but then again when I bought and moved here I did so because I researched school scores and this was a place with good public schools that I could afford. That being said, teachers have been laid off, many are fired at the end of the school year and re-hired at the beginning  (low budgets but small classrooms mandate, still the number is rising again) and I have to pay about ~$400 a year to support the music program (which I do happily). On the same token, taxes on my property went down for about $300 a year and at the same time the schools struggle to keep their quality with shrinking budgets.
---
Education is a complicated subject, and not only on the should I pay public if my son goes to private, or charter school model taking the money out of the system to fund private for profit schools. The quality and pensum are directly linked to the population they serve, if that population is on the low end of the scale, you can predict that the achievement level will be lower even with a decent budget, fundamentally because poorly educated parents don't value education as much nor provide stable environments for children to learn and achieve, but more importantly, because the critical forecasters of academic achievement are missing during the first 2-4 years of life, way before any kid places a foot in a school, those are self control and high vocabulary count. Add to that the bias of red state bible thumpers and that will have an impact, however not as large as you would imagine. There are still plenty of reasonable teachers doing their work all over the country.
---
I do understand the worry and anger about paying into something that apparently doesn't benefit me directly, more if you have to dig into your pocket for the same service, yet we all pay into this state pot that spends money that doesn't benefit us directly, and that doesn't mean that those expenses are unimportant. Take the park services, I don't benefit directly from maintaining Sequoia National Park, or Yellowstone, but I do benefit from the keeping of Everglades National Park, and even if I lived to far away from any national park I am benefiting from it just in carbon sequestration. Do you think that poor people that can't afford private schools now will be able to do so if there were no public schools? How would things be better for everyone if 15% of the population (and growing) can't read, write or do basic math?

There are things that I consider wasteful, at least half military spending if not more, subsidies to many private companies that don't really help anyone other than the owners of those companies, the shady business of the federal reserve that prints and lends money to the banks at 0% to then borrow from the same banks at 5-10% interest rate, and many others, but education is the one thing that should have more money, specially preschool, daycare, and afterschool programs, because the earlier the kids attend to structured plans the higher the achievement will be and that can only benefit everyone.

[Swatopluk]

Slightly off-topic but limiting the salaries of public officials (to less than subsistence level) has primarily two effects:
1) rampant corruption because those officials (unless they fall into category 2) have to rely on bribes to survive
2) only people rich enough to live without a salary can be public officials (or they have to be in category1)

Prime example: Rome in republican times. No public position carried a salary but on the contrary carried lots of expenditures candidates* had to pay from their own pockets => sole rule of the rich and corrupt. After the single year in office (of praetor and consul) they got a province to run as propraetor or proconsul. => ruthless exploitation and sucking-dry of those provinces in order to get rid of the debts incurred during time in office and to get enough riches for comfortable retirement. Rome's rule was anything but benevolent.

*candidatus = person wearing a toga candida (snow-white toga). This signified that the person was running for office and symbolized that he had a 'clean vest' (white= colour of innocence)

[Scriblerus the Philosophe]

Pretty much everything Zono said.

Slightly off-topic but limiting the salaries of public officials (to less than subsistence level) has primarily two effects:
1) rampant corruption because those officials (unless they fall into category 2) have to rely on bribes to survive
2) only people rich enough to live without a salary can be public officials (or they have to be in category1)

Prime example: Rome in republican times. No public position carried a salary but on the contrary carried lots of expenditures candidates* had to pay from their own pockets => sole rule of the rich and corrupt. After the single year in office (of praetor and consul) they got a province to run as propraetor or proconsul. => ruthless exploitation and sucking-dry of those provinces in order to get rid of the debts incurred during time in office and to get enough riches for comfortable retirement. Rome's rule was anything but benevolent.

*candidatus = person wearing a toga candida (snow-white toga). This signified that the person was running for office and symbolized that he had a 'clean vest' (white= colour of innocence)

I can't remember which country it is, but one of those little Asian Tiger island nations (Taiwan, I want to say?) pays their officials an absurd amount - the highest in the world, iirc - and that, combined with the incredibly stiff penalties for corruption means they have the least corrupt government on the planet.

You said you put mini!Stelli into private school because she's doing better there, yes? Is it because the class sizes are small enough that teachers can pay more attention to her? Is the quality of instruction all-around better than in the public system? Better, more up-to-date books?
Did you ever wonder why the public school couldn't offer her that?

No. I put mini-Stelli in private school to avoid the Bible harassment.
Because I want her to be a free thinker and because the Montessori method is something I believe in.

OIC. General, not-specifically-related-to-the-topic, was it teachers or the kids who were harassing? Kids, you can't do much about, but teachers you can take to the principal/district with threats of litigation/publicizing their misdeeds (the ALCU takes cases like this all the time and there are pro bono lawyers doing this if you know where to look/a HELL of a lot rides on a district's reputation).

Scrib,
--ruthless and perfectly willing to be nasty as necessary

one year in public school and she could hardly read
6 months at Montessori and she reads chapter books

I promise you at least part of this is money issues. How many kids were in her class? Especially when dealing with the lower grades, the time a teacher has to devote to each student has a massive impact on their learning. Quality teachers are (often) attracted to schools that can pay them better, too, and teacher quality is the other part of the equation.

more money to schools? not sure about it because of the use they make of it it's not necessarily productive for the children and the money just never seems enough...
on top of the taxes there is the almost weekly charity case for t he school...[/b]

Administration is not afraid of raising their salaries in the face of budget shortfalls (I'm lookin' at you, board of CSU governors), but generally speaking I disagree. And what do you mean "it's not necessarily productive for the children"? Charity case? Do you mean fundraisers the kids do like selling candy and such? You realize that there are activities, which are valid and valuable, that don't get much funding, don't you? EG, I spent years trying to raise money for my high school speech and debate team because we got practically no money from the school even though we consistently were among the best in the state (because, well, football is more visible/exciting/accessible than a bunch of teenagers arguing about foreign policy and morality and acting).
The money is never enough? Well kinda, yeah. New books and good teachers ain't cheap, and neither are quality facilities or awesome educational opportunities.

I wonder what would happen if we half the Military budget and give the other half to education...

A lot of good.

[Swatopluk]

I wonder what would happen if we half the Military budget and give the other half to education...

A lot of good.

Provided it does not all go to Oral Roberts, Falwell's Liberty and similar entities  

[stellinacadente]

How about a system with no public schools where the tuition of children that would normally opt for public schools would be covered by the school community?

If I really think about it, what really bugs me is not that I have to sped double for my daughter's education, but the fact that not all the schools are the same.

They have you trapped in this rat race for the house in the upper class neighborhood just to give your child a shot at decent education...

and that is the main reason why I went for private: I cannot afford to live in a mansion on the hills... so I opt for an apartment in a decent place and pay what I would pay extra to landlord into my daughter's tuition instead.

[Scriblerus the Philosophe]

How about a system with no public schools where the tuition of children that would normally opt for public schools would be covered by the school community?

That's still a public school, unless I'm misunderstanding you.

If I really think about it, what really bugs me is not that I have to sped double for my daughter's education, but the fact that not all the schools are the same.

They have you trapped in this rat race for the house in the upper class neighborhood just to give your child a shot at decent education...

and that is the main reason why I went for private: I cannot afford to live in a mansion on the hills... so I opt for an apartment in a decent place and pay what I would pay extra to landlord into my daughter's tuition instead.

For all schools to be the same, they would all need ample funding. Where would that money come from?

[Swatopluk]

Just for comparision. Over here public schools are financed from the general tax revenue not from specific property taxes from the specific community where the school is located. That eliminates at least the problem of rich schools for rich kids and poor ones for poor. Of course there are still good and bad schools but that at least does not originate from socially lopsided finances.

[Aggie]

I believe that schools here are provincially funded, IIRC. There is the potential for differences between provinces, but little difference between school districts within a province.  Teachers are also union employees and nearly impossible to fire without proof of gross misconduct. It's a respected position that comes with a fair (above-average, especially for teachers with seniority) salary.

On-reserve aboriginal schools fall outside of the provincial system and are generally underfunded and inadequate by comparison. 

[Scriblerus the Philosophe]

Having seen what a non-unionized school district can do to its employees, I would never, ever, EVER work in a district without a union, no matter what.

Just for comparision. Over here public schools are financed from the general tax revenue not from specific property taxes from the specific community where the school is located. That eliminates at least the problem of rich schools for rich kids and poor ones for poor. Of course there are still good and bad schools but that at least does not originate from socially lopsided finances.

Hmm, I don't know that I would necessarily support that here (this may be my privilege speaking here, since I went to a decent school district in a wealthier area*). While there are some stunningly wealthy areas, most of California, for example, is pretty poor, and in those areas a lot of their budget comes from federal and state money (because there is a portion set aside for that). Those districts spend a lot of time floundering (part of this is actually due to the incredibly ass-backwards nature of NCLB, which punishes underperforming schools by taking away funding when the reason they're struggling is heavily, heavily related to a lack of money already) and California's education system already sucks - I think we're in the bottom five in the nation. I would rather have *some* good districts than have all of them suck.


*Quite a bit of that district's budget, actually, comes from community bonds, which are voted on by the city it's based in, although there's some unfairness there since the wealthiest part of the district is actually in Fresno rather than in my city so they get our money without paying any in or voting on the bonds.

[Swatopluk]

Just to clarify, school funding over here is a responsibility of the Länder (=states), so there is a difference between e.g. Bavaria and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Federal action on the topic of schools is an area where Länder and Bund (federal government) clash regularly. The Länder (try to) cooperate on common standards through The Bildungs/Kultusministerkonferenz, i.e. regular talks between the education/culture departments of the different Länder.
Some Länder get accused of luring away good teachers from other less fortunate ones, so it's not all happiness and sauerkraut.