I Hate Bake Sales
thane November 10th, 2006
Every time I see a school fundraiser, I think the same thing. “There is another school, a school in a poorer district, that cannot raise money for that.” That shouldn’t be the case. Poor kids deserve art and music classes as much as rich kids. They deserve to go on field trips and international trips. The problem, however, is even deeper than those.
I don’t know about where you live, but in Oregon, the funding breakdown is like this:
- 35% Local
- 57% State funding
- 6% Federal
- 2% Other
The only reason it is like this is because measure 9 limited property taxes. Before measure 9, it looked like this:
- 66% Local
- 26% State
- 6% Federal
- 2% Other
Left to their own devices, 2/3 of all education funding is derived from the families being educated. IMHO, this is exactly backwards of what should be happening. Funding should look more like this:
- 10% Local
- 20% State
- 70% Federal
My proposed solution is simple, and probably would never work. Average teacher salary, nation wide, is about $47k. With benefits, lets call it $60k. The ideal class size seems to be about 20. Therefore, the Federal government should be supplying $3000 per student to schools, pegged to inflation. In my system, this money could only be used to pay full time teachers, and no teacher could receive, in pay or benefits, the money from more than 20 students. With 81M kids aged 5-19, that is a total of one quarter trillion dollars, or about 5 times the Department of Educations discretionary funding and about half of the Department of Defense budget.
The benefits from this system are manifold. It encourages the hiring of full time teachers, and it encourages the reduction of class size to 20 students. It removes local and state funding problems from the picture, leveling the playing field for poorer districts and poorer states. It mandates that teachers get a decent wage and decent pay increases. It removes much of the federal wheedling about what needs funded and what does not. Lastly, it draws a bright line between what the Federal government needs to pay for and what the local governments need to pay for. The Feds pay for the teachers (plus or minus). The locals must pay for the books, the buildings, and the administrative staff.
But nobody ever asks me.
