The Public Education Funding Model Was Already Broken. The Overspending Induced Recession Just Made This Fact Impossible to Hide!

The local papers are full of wailing and gnashing of teeth over Governor McDonnell’s proposed budget cuts to public school spending but nobody is suggesting how to deal with a multi-billion dollar difference in the revenue coming in and the continued overspending! Those living at the expense of others very predictably demand that the municipal and Commonwealth spending sprees of the past continue! At the same time, those of us paying the bills have seen the real values of our homes fall by a minimum of 20% to as high as over 30%, yet municipal assessors continue to cherry pick the high value sales and generate assessments based on these "comparables” that defy economic reality while ignoring all the foreclosures and the bankruptcy induced distressed sales that end up at a fraction of the original sale price. How is this any different than an individual getting to represent his own financial condition as healthy while ignoring all the bounced checks? It doesn’t take a CPA to figure out that the over-assessments of private property continue only to fund continued municipal over-spending using revenue generated by those assessments!

Clearly public school Districts and School Boards have continued to spend the public's money as if it were Monopoly money. Suffolk chose to build a $46 million dollar Kings Fork High School when there was a competing bid on the table that would have cost less than $35 million. They do it all the time. Similarly, every Teacher’s Union and public school District that I am aware of shuns any discussion of merit pay to reward and retain best performers while also signaling deadwood and the ill performing that perhaps they need to be looking into a different career. Even more absurd, every School District insists on raising pay for everybody in the system by the same percentage rate even thought this fails to put additional funds where they are needed most. But the education bureaucrats making over $100,000 also end up with a numerically higher pay hike that is totally unjustified and numerically dwarfs the pay hikes of all the Special Education, science, math, history, and English teachers who are directly responsible for retention, graduation, and disciplinary achievements of the school system. They are the individuals who are working the hardest and making the difference—not those who discovered early on that all the lucrative rewards in public education go to those who manage to escape the classroom! Every fat education bureaucrat or School Board member sporting a $500 suit is willing to proclaim to anyone willing to listen that there is simply no way to determine performance differences between individuals working for them. But when every leader in a successful private sector firm has been doing exactly this for many decades, this only further highlights the total lack of intellectual honesty and managerial competence at all levels of public education today! Little of the performance and management philosophy coming out of public education bureaucrats and teachers unions today passes the straight face test. It is developed by people who have learned nothing more than how to justify increased spending every year without tying revenue to performance! In richer areas where education waste inflicts less pain on the community, the paying public have larger concerns to deal with. But in many parts of Hampton Roads, and especially in Suffolk, continued lousy education at ever increasing costs has gone beyond painful to intolerable! And in a recession there is no place to hide the ugly truth. It’s not a funding problem; it’s a performance problem. And since most Districts have been unable to improve performance with greatly increased funding over the past decades, cutting that funding will only force School Districts to cut spending where it won’t make a difference. The unfortunate fact is that most public school educators today have no idea where they have been wasting all the money because they have never successfully tied funding to performance in the first place. Sucks to be them!!