Delivering Quality Education Really is About the Money

January 11, 2010

In recent months, there has been a lot of hot air blowing around the op-ed pages about the horrible state of the educational system in California. These opinions have been written by people who haven’t taken the time to read the other articles in the paper, do the research or frankly, do the simple math.

Of course, how can we blame them when our own elected officials can’t do it either. The largest problem has been money, continues to be money and will most likely continue to be money in the future because you really do get what yo u pay for, and it really does take money to educate people. There has also never been a truer statement than "you can build schools or you can build prisons" because that is also how it really works.

Since California can’t afford its overpriced prison system, we’re letting 40,000 of them out early into our neighborhoods. I guess in California we should change the saying to "you can build schools or let prisoners run free in your streets." Perhaps we should let the prisoners have the schools $5,200 per year per student money and trade it for the $50,000 per year per prisoner money!

California is in an economic mess, but it doesn’t excuse what’s been going on for some time. While our entire educational system has been hit, I’m going to focus on K-12. With the budget cuts over the last few years combined with those now being implemented, California will now be last among all 50 states in per pupil spending. In fact, we now spend less than numerous Third World countries do.
In a recent article, the Chino Valley Unified School District talked about the $5,200 per student, per year, that California K-12 schools receive from the state to educate your children. That’s $520 a month folks. You can’t get day care for that amount of money in this state, yet, let’s educate the kids! Let’s give them shiny facilities, arts, music, physical education, highly educated and motivated teachers, field trips, supplies, libraries, the whole Norman Rockwell experience – for $520 a month, good luck.

Another article in the same paper talked about Pomona Unified School District and how, after already losing an enormous amount of its budget, is now set to lose 24 percent of what’s left. Twenty-four percent! Try thinking of your personal home budget or any other budget you can think of, that after stretching it to the bone already, you were told another 24 percent was coming o ut. But of course, 24 percent of the kids aren’t going away. You’ll still have to produce a complete product, at the same levels, with even better results.

Now Sacramento has passed bills to chase the wondrous federal "Race to the Top" money. The $4.3 billion spending bonanza, put on by the illustrious Obama administration and brought to you by the deficits our children will have to pay back (talk about taking out loans for your education), wants California to turn its whole education system on its head, in an instant, to qualify for our $300 million to a maximum of $700 million dollar share. California has more than 6 million kids in school. That’s somewhere between $50 and $116 per student in one time money. Yay. New erasers for everyone!

It’s time the people of California give up this illusion that you can get something of quality for next to nothing. California has over 6 million kids to teach. Over 30 percent of them are English learners in over 55 languages! That’s almost 2 million of the 6 million in 55 different languages that need special help just to learn. It costs money and takes time. Yes, $30 billion to $50 billion sounds like a lot of money, and it is. But so is 6 million, and when you break it down, you see just how dismal it is.

There are a lot of things you can do to save state money. Defer maintenance. Hold off repaving that street. Don’t trim that tree. Follow other states’ prison system examples and save $30,000 per year, per prisoner. And yes, the illegal immigrant situation is burdening us all as well. The problem with schools is that the workload doesn’t decrease with funding. No one says we’re only teaching 75 percent of the kids this year and holds a lottery.

The teachers are not the problem either. They are not overpaid by any stretch of the imagination. Even with today’s collapsed housing prices, the average teacher would not quali fy to buy the average home. These are people with bachelor’s degrees and at least one additional year beyond that, many with master’s degrees and an average of 10 years on the job. The average teacher retires at 60 percent of his or her final pay. Not 90 percent like our police and fire departments. By the way, teachers don’t get Social Security, either. They are leaving in droves, however, and unless California can get its act together, we will be hard-pressed to find enough replacements.

Despite the fantasy world some people live in, there are simply not enough, nor will there ever be enough, private schools, home schools or charter schools to ever educate our 6 million kids. Besides, private schools cost more than $520 a month. In fact the good ones are about $25,000 a year! It would solve the problem of 2 million English learners, however, since they wouldn’t admit them.

Teachers do have a problem. They need to stop being doormats. They need to stop blindly voting for every Democrat who comes along, especially the ones who aren’t supporting them. They need to get vocal about what’s wrong in their districts and even how the state runs education. They need to get their state union under control and representative of all their members, Democrats, Republicans and Independents.

Bottom line, our children definitely are California’s future. If we don’t spend the money to educate our multicultural society, there won’t be any money for anything … just like now.