Homeschool News & Views
Issue 83, August 23, 2008
From Homeschool Helpers
In association with Pass It On Ministries
By Dan L. White
The public schools are in a pinch. This year about everything costs more. A lot more.
The government schools have always had about all the money they could consume. Now they are being forced to make some changes.
Many school districts are cutting back on field trips. Some are postponing buying new buses, because they have to use those funds to pay for higher gasoline. A few school districts are going to a four day week. They have each class during those four days go ten minutes longer. In four days they gain an extra forty minutes per class that way, so they cancel the fifth day. Mostly those are in very rural farm areas, where people actually stay at home during the day. Otherwise the working parents have to find day care for that fifth day.
School bus routes are being affected by the cutbacks. This year it costs much more to fuel a school bus. In some districts, school buses were stopping at every house to pick up the kids. That uses enormous amounts of fuel. Now the kids have to walk to a common bus stop, where several are picked up at a time. In some cases school bus routes are being consolidated, to make more efficient use of personnel and equipment. In some places in California, parents are charged for bus transportation to school, and those charges are going up. In Michigan, one school district is changing its kindergarten from half a day to all day, eliminating the extra bus runs in the middle of the day, and also eliminating half a day that a young child might spend with a parent.
About half of all school kids ride a school bus to school. Others walk or ride bikes, but many just have their parents drive them to school. Many school buses are nearly empty on their runs. I know that locally a 40 passenger school bus goes by every weekday with about a half dozen kids in it. Sometimes I go by the school in the late afternoon when school is letting out and get caught in a line of school buses. Most are nowhere near full.
That’s extremely wasteful, but since it’s a socialist monopoly, nobody cares. They can waste as much taxpayer money as they want. They’re doing it for the children.
In fact, the goal of the socialist monopoly is always to get more money. I had a school principal who was a tennis buddy tell me that once. He said the name of the game is always to get more money. If a school department does not use up all its allotted funds, then the next year it will not get as much funding, since it will be assumed it wasn’t needed. Therefore each department of the monopoly focuses not on saving as much as they can, but on spending as much as they can.
That’s socialism, par excellence. Think of how much fuel and American property tax money is wasted all across America by just the one custom of running nearly empty school buses. A non-socialist enterprise would not run empty buses. They would make whatever changes they had to make to be efficient, or else somebody more efficient would put them out of business. It is very hard to put government monopolies out of business, no matter how inefficient they are.
The extreme waste of the socialist government schools not only applies in smaller areas, like school buses.
In Los Angeles, of California, of course, they have spent $175 million to build a high school, and it is not yet in a usuable state. They are adding about another hundred million dollars to the bill. If they ever get that high school completed, how much will that figure out per pupil? Only government can waste money like that.
In south Florida, auditors charged the Miami-Dade school district with wasting more than a hundred million dollars in spending on its school facilities. How do you waste a hundred million dollars in one school district?
Another function of socialist government monopolies is outright fraud, just as it was in socialist Russia. In a school district in Long Island, New York, a school superintendent and an administrator were charged with stealing more than a million dollars – each – from the district. The authorities are still investigating another eight million dollars in missing funds.
In Fort Worth, Texas, a school maintenance director and a construction contractor were sentenced to eight years in prison for defrauding the school district of about sixteen million dollars.
In Louisiana, a payroll clerk stole a quarter million dollars by writing checks to herself under another name. Eight employees stole seventy thousand dollars by splitting the illegal checks with a payroll clerk. And an auditors’ report said that three million dollars in illicit school checks have been given out. The New Orleans police superintendent said that investigating corruption in the school system is like “eating an elephant..” For those of you who have never eaten an elephant, that means its very big. “We just took the first bite,” he said.
So the public schools are now pinched financially. They always ask for more money, but now everyone else is pinched financially, too. I don’t want them to even think about raising my property taxes again. A Democratic governor of Missouri doubled our property taxes. His name is like a green persimmon in my mouth.
In fact, with real estate prices dropping more than they have in the last 75 years, somebody is going to start demanding that property taxes be reduced, which would reduce the amount of money going to the wasteful government schools. Hint, hint.
This economic contraction is just getting going. The trend is down. Things will get worse before they get better. Therefore there is a strong possibility that America will finally want the whole education system to become more efficient. That means ending the monopoly.
Along that line, Patrick Byrne has been elected as co-chairman of the board of the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice. The Wall Street Journal says that the Friedman Foundation people are the nation’s leading voucher advocates. Byrne is not a quiet diplomat. He is a fighter. He is the head of Overstock.com, a big firm like Ebay or Amazon. He has been spearheading a drive against naked short selling of stocks, which practice has recently helped bring down some financial institutions. And he is a very active proponent of educational freedom. When the teachers’ unions reversed the educational freedom law in Utah, Byrne almost single handedly financed the opposition to them.
The Friedman Foundation has been around since 1996. A spokesman for them said, "When the Friedman Foundation started in 1996 there were five school voucher and tax credit programs operating in five states.” Of course, those are not statewide programs, but only small programs within five states. He goes on, “Today, after 12 years of our effective work to educate the public, there are 24 programs operating in 14 states and the District of Columbia.” That is an increase, but not very much of an increase. Most people still automatically accept the socialist education monopoly. So they really haven’t gotten much done. But the Friedman spokesman concluded, “With Patrick on board I expect this number to skyrocket..”
You see, this massive economic contraction presents the opportunity for America to rid itself of this burden of educational socialism that it has been carrying for so long. The reality of less money may introduce the reality of private enterprise education to America.
There’s an irony in that. It is the liberals who have forced the prices of fuel to quadruple in the last few years. They have fought drilling to find more oil, dams to generate electricity, refineries to make more gasoline, and nuclear power plants to generate electricity. The one thing they have supported is paying higher and higher prices for oil to America’s enemies. Socialist Norway liked the recent jump in gasoline prices so much that they added extra taxes on their gasoline, just to make it cost more.
However, by the liberals forcing up the price of fuel, there is a chance that they will undercut their single greatest political tool in America, the public schools. If people get fed up with the wasteful, terrible socialist schools and can’t stand any more increases in their property taxes, they may decide to end the public school monopoly.