Flunking Common Sense: California K-12 Spending

Here's something to think about for the day:

• Between the 2004-2005 budget year and the 2007-2008 budget year, California K-12 expenditures increased by 8 billion dollars or 18% percent.
• 72% of the total increase was accounted for by the nearly 6 billion increase in expenditures categorized as Instruction and Instruction Related Services.
• Over that same period of time enrollment (those being instructed) decreased by 46,698 or around 1%.

Want to check out the numbers yourself:

http://www.ed-ata.k12.ca.us/

And what did we get for this additional 8 billion dollars? An education system that the US Chamber of Commerce considers to be 42nd in the nation.

My personal opinion on the matter...

Voters are to emotive to hold schools, teachers, and their government to a higher standard - fiscally or otherwise. They see ad after ad come election cycle about how Johnny can't read and that all he needs is just a few more teachers or a few more dollars. So the whip out their vote and shell out their taxpaying dollar.

Schools won't complain, they've told themselves for years that they are underfunded and underpaid. The thing is, there is no basis for making a claim to what is 'due' them since there is no tangible dollar figure that can be placed on education. We know it to be intrinsically valuable, but intrinsic doesn't equal 52 billion dollars (the 2007-2008 total CA K-12 expenditure). But the paradigm has been set that dollars equals success in schools and there will be no internal shift on that view as long as the dollars continue to flow.

Some argue that this is just another sign that 'big government' can't handle this sort of thing and that we should switch to private schooling or charter schools. I believe that to be BS. We like to lay off our stupidity as the voting public on to lawmakers and bureaucrats. Yet we vote like hell for them the minute we find out that they support increasing teachers and spending our tax dollars on new schools. This is a democracy and what we get is what we deserve. Since we aren't getting much, we need to look to ourselves if we want to see any change.

Now there is something that you can learn and teach your kids for free.