Heads and tales: Thumbed tax
By Wade Kwon
Poll dancing: Jefferson County voters can renew or reject Tuesday a pair of property taxes that generates $15 million annually for the county school system. That is, those who know a vote’s afoot. Does money make a difference? A recent “20/20” report says, “National graduation rates and achievement scores are flat, while spending on education has increased more than 100 percent since 1971. More money hasn’t helped American kids.”
Update: See Stossel’s report (41 min.).
• Hammonds: Two school taxes critical [Birmingham News]
Tube tribe: For a good chunk of the 20th century, TV watching was a shared experience, even as we hid away in our homes. Now, viewing parties are bringing us back together, if only for 60 minutes at a time. One such party involves the Monday night ritual of watching the popular action epic, “24,” at a Hoover steakhouse. But will anyone come to our “E-Ring” party next week?
• Tubing together [Christian Science Monitor]
Our digital past: Melinda at the library tipped us off that the Birmingham Public Library has put part of its archive online. History buffs and curious browsers can see newspaper articles, photos, engravings and other odds and ends. For example, check out a few clippings from our favorite newspaper. The library system has quite a bit of good stuff going on, from new self-checkouts to librarians training as storytellers.
• Birmingham Public Library Launches New Digital Collections (press release) [Birmingham Public Library’s Digital Collections Blog]
Also:
- Waiting room magazines preview '99 cars, trucks
- State of the city: Alabama
- Teen fans use camphone to document concert, car ride, late-night trip to gas station mart
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Send us your news tips.
Monday, January 23, 2006, 11:55 pm
I hope my **$7**/picture scanning fee from the archives went towards putting all of this info online. It deserves to be shared 🙂
Tuesday, January 24, 2006, 11:36 am
John Stossel makes it sound so simple…
“Competition inspires people to do what we didn’t think we could do. If people got to choose their kids’ school, education options would be endless. There could soon be technology schools, science schools, virtual schools where you learn at home on your computer, sports schools, music schools, schools that go all year, schools with uniforms, schools that open early and keep kids later, and, who knows what else. If there were competition, all kinds of new ideas would bloom.”
but I think he’s ignoring some important factors. First, the 100 percent leap in spending, I doubt. If all schools were rolling in money then why do half of the schools in Birmingham have only a handful of books in the library, and why do suburban schools consistently outperform schools in poorer districts? Granted I don’t have the numbers, but most of the schools in this country are funded primarily by property taxes. If the federal government increased its share then probably the local government lowered the taxes. And that number is an average — forget the fact that most of the schools may not have increased money for students at all. WHO doubled WHICH spending? It’s very vague. Here’s an article that describes this vagueness better than I can: http://www.epinet.org/content.cfm/books_wheremoneygone
Secondly, there ARE already all of those types of schools and many of them are public.
I agree with him that better teachers=better schools. That’s the main factor, I think, and salary will attract good teachers. But just giving the kids the money that the schools would have gotten is not going to raise teachers’ salaries, and could do the opposite (not to mention keep schools in a constant state of flux with regard to budget). Also, the reason many public schools cannot just divert money into different pots like the charter school did is because public schools need money for disabled students and special needs that I bet the charter school was not serving. If schools had to compete to survive, how many of those students would get an education at all?
I am guessing that most of those countries that outperform us have government-sponsored education. I would say that is the #2 function of government after protection. While our government is not doing a great job of meeting minimum education standards for everyone, and the bureaucracy could definitely use an overhaul, there’s a lot more to this equation than money. If we prioritized education we would try to fix the public schools and not abandon them, by looking at reality instead of bandaid solutions. John Stossel is the stupid one.
Wednesday, January 25, 2006, 11:09 pm
First update: The tax passed. We’ll come back to it.
Here’s my additional 2 cents.
I just watched the “20/20” earlier this week on videotape, so a lot of it is still fresh in my mind.
Stossel’s base argument has always been: Competition has been good in the free market, so why is it bad in public schools? After having watched the program, I can see his point. No competition in public schools has forced parents to either move to better districts, or if they can’t afford it, punish their children with a sub-standard education.
The numbers he cited were adjusted for inflation and showed a terrible pattern: Whether spending went up by 100 percent or even 61 percent (from the report you cited), graduation rates have remained unchanged. Worse, reading and math test scores went down.
Where is the money go? I’m glad you cited Birmingham schools, because you and I have seen firsthand that the money goes to administrators’ pockets, mismanaged (or crooked) accounting and poorly planned schools. The system spent $45 million on the new Carver High, and only a few years later, problems with cracks in the foundation and wiring. One of the most expensive new construction projects, and the damn building is falling apart.
That money should be going to teacher salaries, to attract the smartest most innovative bunch, rather than some of the dead weight protected by teachers’ unions. But that money is instead going to administrators, bad buildings and waste and status quo.
Not nearly enough. Not when hundreds of students can’t switch schools in the Birmingham district, as mandated by the No Child Left Behind act. Parents had to threaten legal action against the board, just to have their transfer requests considered. No matter: Most transfers were denied, and those kids are stuck in the hellhole schools.
Schools in Alabama are already in a constant state of flux with regard to budget. Because of a backwards state constitution and unfair tax system and proration, schools often find it’s either feast or famine. Just now, legislators are trying to spend a $500 mil “surplus” because … it’s an election year. Not save for a rainy day, but go for a quick fix.
Stossel’s argument is that if money is tied to kids’ choice, then schools will either compete for their business, or fail. What do we do with failing schools now? Keep them open, so they can hold their students back.
As shown on the program, several public charter schools are doing better at educating disabled and special needs children, because they can make better spending decisions and lower the student-teacher ratio and hire the right teachers.
The point is: So many students aren’t getting an education right now. Let’s get rid of bad schools once and for all. Let’s get rid of bad teachers once and for all. Let’s not keep pouring more money in a broken system and assume we’re getting a good deal for our tax dollars.
I agree, there’s more to it than money. The special cited lack of choice, teachers’ unions and misinformed parents who know little about how dire the situation is in schools today. All of these problems add up to an educational system that’s already far behind the rest of the world. The solutions cited in the special were far from bandaid solutions: They were radically different, and they worked.
I’m more than ready to abandon bad public schools, unqualified teachers and greedy administrators. But we’ve got to band together on this.
We are the stupid ones if we fail to fix a system we know is broken.
One last thing: That tax passed with an 11 percent voter turnout. I don’t blame voter apathy completely, not when administrators couldn’t trust the public to vote its conscience, so it kept the vote as quiet as possible. Why not have the vote on a regular election day? Secret votes are poison to democracy.
Monday, January 30, 2006, 1:28 pm
I had a whole long reply thought out, but not time to put it into words, so I’ll just say this. The government has a responsibility to educate children. If a business in competition fails, then that businessperson loses money and possibly stockholders. If a school fails, and is shut down, all of those children lose. If all of the schools in a whole city fail, it’s not practical to send kids to a different city. You have busing and travel time to worry about, also a political system that wouldn’t allow for it. The only solution is to keep assisting and supporting the schools that we have. Finding better ways to improve the quality of education, yes, but not requiring that schools meet some person’s standards or close down.
That brings me to the second point: We have no reliable way of measuring school progress. Standardized tests have proven disastrous as a measurement tool in NCLB. Schools cheat to get good scores; or teachers teach to the test, all to the detriment of a real education. So we can’t really base judgment or funding off of scores.
Also, who cares if the average funding per pupil has gone up 60 percent if the poorest schools still haven’t received more money? That really is an empty number to me and the 20/20 program didn’t explain it well enough to bolster their cause. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/backgrounders/school_funding.html
“As shown on the program, several public charter schools are doing better at educating disabled and special needs children, because they can make better spending decisions and lower the student-teacher ratio and hire the right teachers.”
Right now, public schools are required to educate these kids; charter schools can choose whether to do that or not. Again, we have to have this law in order to protect the weakest and to make sure that this type of education is available in every neighborhood. It doesn’t do kid A much good to have services for disabled children in school district B.
By the way, did you know that public schools are already funded according to how many children attend? And if that hasn’t worked so far, what makes you think it would start working by expanding this? No Child Left Behind tried to make schools more competitive by tying funding to standardized test performance. Bad schools have gotten weaker while good schools have gotten better. Maybe you’d like to cut the losses with the bad schools and shut them down. Let’s send all of Birmingham city schoolchildren to Hoover! Meanwhile BCS infrastructure gets worse, libraries dwindle, class sizes go up, and the kids who can’t get to Hoover suffer more. Meanwhile Hoover schools burst over and have to turn people away. Not practical. Kids in Birmingham deserve to have good schools in Birmingham. Should they be able to choose which public school to attend? Perhaps. But let’s not abandon the schools that aren’t chosen, because where else are the kids going to go when there’s no room left at W.C. Christian?
Also if we didn’t have teachers’ unions, can you imagine the kind of pay and benefits teachers would be gettting now? They are lucky to be eking out a lower-middle-class existence as is.
Funding needs to be way different for schools, I agree. ANd there needs to be a more efficient way to fire incompetent administrators and teachers.
I just don’t think competition works when you’re playing with something so important and vital that each American deserves a minimum standard. See: health care.
Friday, March 10, 2006, 1:09 pm
I added video of John Stossel’s report on American schools — definitely worth 41 minutes of your time.