The Broward school district on Monday delivered pink slips to 1,305 teachers, secretaries and maintenance workers as the school district struggles to close a $130 million budget shortfall.
Two days before the school year ends, the district notified 568 teachers and 737 noninstructional employees that they will not have jobs when classes resume in the fall.
“This is the worst possible scenario coming true,” School Board Chairwoman Jennifer Gottlieb said.
Given the weak correlation, except at the very bottom, between education spending and student performance, this may be a very prudent move. The local NEA president several years ago was extremely candid when a reporter noticed that all the demands benefited the teachers, and not the students. He said that “When the students start paying union dues, he would worry about them more.” True story, and something which gets played from time to time.
What’s definitely also true is that teachers will consumer less affecting lots of local businesses. The unemployed may then be forced to foreclose on their houses. Property values will go down. Lower tax base. Then less money. Then more firing.
School vouchers back in the 1990’s would likely have avoided this and also provided a superior education for the students.
Before one gets too excited, consider that Broward County is the sixth largest school system in the country, and that on their website they list 15,716 teachers for 255,000 students. The layoffs represent 3.6% of teachers and 3.5% total personnel, sending them from 16.2 pupils/teacher to 16.8 pupils/teacher.
Vouchers would have made the situation worse. Budget cuts, after all, are budget cuts, and many small independent schools losing funds would mean many of them closing outright, dumping their students back into a now-overtaxed and underfunded public system.
From farther down in the story:
This happens in California every year. Usually, by the fall, most if not all are hired back. Of course, it makes for a stressful time for the teachers, but these numbers are sometimes used in the media to create sympathy for higher taxes.
[blockquote]…figures available from the U.S. Department of Education show that in 2000 the average tuition for private elementary schools nationwide was $3,267. Government figures also indicate that 41 percent of all private elementary and secondary schools — more than 27,000 nationwide — charged less than $2,500 for tuition. Less than 21 percent of all private schools charged more than $5,000 per year in tuition. According to these figures, elite and very expensive private schools tend to be the exception in their communities, not the rule.
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3231%5B/blockquote%5D
Average cost per pupil in public schools is over $12,000
Vouchers would have made a difference.
I trust the Cato Institute about as far as I can throw it in the absence of citations (of which the article in question contains exactly none), but in any case a lower budget is still vulnerable in the face of cuts. Perhaps they would have lower tax rates because they would be spending less money due to vouchers: when the revenue shortfall comes, they would still have to make cuts, or raise taxes.
so why not just offer $5000 vouchers – seems like everyone would win – the system saves over 7000 per pupil that they can invest in those that remain – the students who leave are presumably happier – those who stay get more money – or the taxpayers just spend less on education and their taxes go down
and if the cato institute is wrong no one will take the money
I’ve managed to find what actually might be the source of the statistics Cato used (see here for private schools and here for public) and there are some huge holes in their claims. First, the 2000 data for private schools are half what they are for for 2007-2008 (latest data available). Second, the data are not comparable because private school data shows tuition, not expenditures. Donations (cash and in kind) form a substantial part of private school expenditures: where I went, endowment and annual fund revenue equaled tuition.
All this leaves aside the question of whether increasing the size of the private school non-system by a factor of ten would allow it to continue to function with the same costs it has now, or that it would be able to operate as well at such a size.
#11
I don’t have a dog in this fight since we home school and spend about $1,000 per child for curriculum. I do know that we spend about $10,000 per student for public education, not counting administration costs and not counting support costs or capital investment costs – they separate those costs out so it doesn’t look so bad. The total real costs are in the neighborhood of about $30,000 per average pupil.
If the pupil is a discipline problem, we foot the bill for about $50,000 per delinquent for a tutor to be taxied to the pupil’s home. The teacher is still stuck with the record keeping and assigning the work. I don’t blame the teachers for the problems. The school administrators get paid outrageous compensation packages and add little or nothing to the educational process. Then, we have all the mandated PC indoctrination that competes for class time. We also have a major discipline problem, yet the courts and legislature have destroyed the ability to effectively deal with discipline issues. I firmly believe that corporal punishment judiciously executed with due process and with parental consent would go a long way toward resolving the discipline problems.
It’s sad to see the layoffs come. I still think that if we had had vouchers for the past 20 years, the kids would have had a better education and the schools would not have gotten top heavy, nor would they have hired too many teachers. It will be a tough sell to raise taxes on people’s depressed home values while they are out of work and just barely keeping from foreclosure. There is an old saying about not being able to get blood from a turnip that I think is applicable.
I seem to recall that every experiment with school vouchers was a rousing success. I can’t remember a single instance where they ended up being a worse choice for people or their kids. The only folks that seem to be dead set against them are public school employees. Folks might be a bit more sympathetic, but the literacy rate in our county is abysmal with about 60% reading in the lower 3 of 5 levels of proficiency. (In the city of Hartford, 73% of adults are functionally illiterate.) Sources: https://www.casas.org/lit/litcode/Detail.CFM?census__AREAID=7
http://www.readtogrow.org/Content/Literacy_Info_and_Statistics.asp
I also read that the illiteracy rate in 1915 was about 1 child per 1,000. That was back when there were one-room schoolhouses, mixed ages in the same rooms, no teacher’s aides, corporal punishment, outhouses, woodstoves, and reform schools. Maybe we should turn the clock backward and do school the way we did in 1915. Perhaps we could return to a 99% literacy rate!
Hartford is of course quite poor and largely non-white (especially Puerto Rican, but also lots of blacks), with a high proportion of families headed by single mothers. It’s hardly fair to compare it with numbers for the country as a whole; it would not surprise me to find that, in 1915, the rural black South and Puerto Rico itself were as illiterate. I also have to doubt the one in a thousand number anyway, as the rates for retardation alone are higher than that. Finally, the CASA numbers are not really comparable to such an old number; certainly they were not measured the same way.
I don’t have any argument with you over the notion that public schools could be run better. There was a recent article in the Atlantic suggesting what everyone already suspected: that good teachers are the key ingredient, and that therefore the current unionized system is a real problem. The thing is that a lot of what makes the current private school system work is that it doesn’t see much pressure from numbers. I don’t think the current accreditation system, for instance, would survive a five- or ten-fold expansion. Nor does any private school have to educate my retarded son, nor the more severely damaged kid down the street.
I am not saying that vouchers don’t work. I do doubt, however, that they will work on a large scale. It seems to me that the deeper argument for them is partly the reaction against liberal indoctrination that you’ve already expressed, and partly an economic dogmatism I which I do not have faith.