Dick,
In addition to the multiple disagreements I have about your opinions in
your previous post, I'd like to also disagree with the one that looks like
it might reflect data - you are using as a potential fact: "$22,000 per
year per student to support a high school learner, the dollars are greater
today."
You are not familiar with school finance if you think every student
receives $22K. Site your sources or please don't use that information.
I HOPE you are wise enough to know that you would NEVER use an average of
student spending when calculating this figure.
- MN gives a base amount
- SOME cities give additional $, all cities are different
- MN gives additional funding to kids on free or reduced lunch, and the
number increases dependent upon the concentration of poverty at the school
attended.
- The National Gov gives money to schools who have concentrations of
poverty (if you can believe it, it is dependent upon the area, so Edina
schools can have less poverty but still get Title, when a MPS school with
higher % actually doesn't get Title funding! but I digress...)
- Both the nation and the state give funding (not enough) to help pay for
special education needs, as well as ELL needs.
Also, the city bonds for school buildings, but then the city owns them. It
wouldn't make any sense to include any capital funding, as organizations
would need to own their own buildings (or rent). which is a poor use of
funding, since the city will then not own anything for those dollars spent
(this is ONE of the problems with funding of charter schools and why they
are a poor use for tax dollars.)
Regarding your opinions about Vouchers:
- incenting organizations to use students as guinea pigs is a poor idea,
and will hurt the most vulnerable the worst
- because special education and ELL students' needs are underfunded, there
would be no "group of students in the district" to skim from to meet the
needs of those students. Those students will not get their needs met in a
voucher game. (Some students' needs cost over $150K each. -think teacher +
nurse, full time care, special individual transportation 2x/day, equipment,
etc)
- spreading tax dollars into too many organizations dilutes the services to
all (imagine if we could all get our parks money out to use in our private
park! what would happen? the price of private parks would increase (market
flooded, so get the people that can afford the voucher plus cash) and
people who couldn't add to the base would end up with the now horrendously
underfunded park system)
Public systems aren't perfect and certainly need work, but haven't we
learned enough about privatizing the public goods to know it is a mistake?
There's more, but, geez, these things should be obvious to anyone who
thinks they follow education enough to continuously propose a wild new
strategy.
Gwen Spurgat
Linden Hills