With Gov. Christie cutting back on state funding for schools, every town in New Jersey just held a vote to increase local taxes to schools. Our town was one of the few in our county to vote down the tax levy. As a result, a bunch of teachers are going to get fired and the school district is going to move to half-day Kindergarten classes. Special education will be cut. Property values will probably go down.
Even though the tax increase would have only have increased taxes by $20 per month, people voted it down. Why? We have a lot of seniors in our town who don't think that the schools benefit them and believe that the kids are spoiled. Sexism plays a role, because education is still a female-dominated profession. There are a lot of people who are genuinely struggling in this economy, and $20 is a lot for them.
One of the biggest problems in getting these local tax levies passed is the fact that school elections are held in April. Only the die-hard voters show up; the die-hard voters tend to be seniors. A lot of parents are too busy to show up to vote. School elections have been run at odd times for a hundred years in this country, because they were set up by the Progressives who wanted to isolate the schools from the corruption of regular politics. That tradition has lived on, because school board officials want to keep their elections uncompetitive. If school elections and tax levy votes were held in November, it would be much better for our schools.
It's interesting looking at the voting results for these local towns. The elections were decided by a couple hundred votes. This is one case when it highly rational to vote. Your vote really does make a difference. But only a fraction of the voters show up at the polls. Apathy wins the day.
It's not just the towns in New Jersey that are facing major cuts in schools. The New York Times reports that this is a nation-wide problem.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan
estimated that state budget cuts imperiled 100,000 to 300,000 public
school jobs. In an interview on Monday, he said the nation was flirting
with “education catastrophe,” and urged Congress to approve additional
stimulus funds to save school jobs.
The U.S. government has bailed out Wall Street and the auto industry. Is it time for a national bailout of schools? Shouldn't our schools be too important to fail?
Apt. 11d 
Is it time for a national bailout of schools?
Not without any accountability and changes in credentialing rules it isn’t. I pay more in taxes to the public school system than I do for the tuition at the school my child actually attends.
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“Not without any accountability and changes in credentialing rules it isn’t.”
What does this mean? (Not a snarky question.) We already have NCLB and accountability, and I don’t know what you mean about the credentialing thing.
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Is there any data to support the idea that school levies are more likely to pass in November? (any school levies actually held then)? In our neck of the woods, the “progressives” do believe that the levies pass better in off-elections (and we tend to pass local levies). Should we be revising our planning (especially a concern for state-wide elections)?
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The Progressives are different from modern progressives. They were a group of reformers at the turn of the century that believed that government could be run scientifically. Fascinating group of people. Huge impact on schools.
I’m not sure about data re: Nov. v. April elections and school levies. I’m not sure that there’s enough data on Nov elections to have a valid study. Good question though. I’m going to check it out.
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MH exhibits the mistrust of public schools that is endemic, and makes people unwilling to vote higher taxes. Some part of this distrust is simply a result of the long and successful campaign against government by conservatives. Some of it is rooted in the failures of government that made it possible for that campaign to be successful. The truth is that there is a lot of inefficiency in the schools, a lot of what can only be called incompetence at the district level (it irritates me no end when people blame teachers unions for problems that are in large part the fault of the very people they are, perfectly reasonably in the circumstances, trying to protect their members from — if you were at risk of being evaluated and fired by a former gym teacher, you’d want a union to protect you too). Because school boards are largely populated by people who know next to nothing about education (but either have some ambition to be in higher office, or just an important person in the community, or have some hobby horse about some educational fad) they are very unlikely to make high quality decisions about the personnel they hire to run the districts or about strategic matters for the district. Sensing all this (though not necessarily able to articulate it, partly because even when there were newspapers, very few had education correspondents who felt a responsibility to be well-informed about education policy) lots of otherwise pretty well-intentioned voters are reluctant to pay for schools. And then there’s the problem that in a world of low fertility rates and geographic mobility, older voters do not feel they have a personal stake in the quality of schools. And last of all, because women can get other jobs now, public schools no longer have an artificially cheap supply of highly talented teachers (women) so they have to pay market rates to get high quality labour.
Annoying, innit.
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“It will probably also mean a lowering of property values.”
Then homes will become more affordable for families, and for teachers, too.
Nationwide, (barring unexpectedly high inflation) salaries are headed down across the board. There is no way that public sector salaries and benefits can stay at current levels. This article says that “NJ property taxes rose 3.3 percent last year, the lowest rate of increase in a decade.”
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-02-26/n-j-property-taxes-climb-by-least-since-1999-state-reports.html
The article also says that the average NJ real estate levy is $7,200 a year. That works out to $600 a month, which is more than many elderly residents spend on food.
“The U.S. government has bailed out Wall Street and the auto industry. Is it time for a national bailout of schools? Shouldn’t our schools be too important to fail?”
As to a bailout, it beats me why the country at large (which is generally poorer than NJ) needs to be financially responsible for a party that we were never invited to.
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Wendy, what I mean by accountability is that if we dump a bunch of new resources into education and (as has happened locally*) things fail to get better or get worse, I would like to see people fired, starting with superintendents and principals. The NCLB helped see who was failing, but that’s only part of accountability. I am very tired of deals where I have an upside and a downside but the other party only has an upside.
As for credentialing, in PA, you cannot be a teacher without the right BA. It does not matter if you have a Ph.D. and have been teaching in a community college for a dozen years. It does not matter if you have been teaching in another state for 20 years. The teachers have a union that is designed to limit entry to an appalling degree.
*A 25% drop in enrollment over a dozen years and no drop in funding is a huge boost in resources per student.
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I think I would suggest contract buyouts. There are upfront costs but long-term savings (I suppose that means the idea is doomed politically). A couple years ago, Ford (and one of the Japanese companies here) was offering $100,000 to practically any employee who would quit. I don’t know how Ford dealt with pension obligations.
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MH exhibits the mistrust of public schools that is endemic, and makes people unwilling to vote higher taxes.
My mom taught in public schools for years in three different districts and enjoyed her work. This was conveyed to me throughout my childhood. I have no general distrust of public schools. I have very specific complaints about the public schools in my area. And I am willing to pay higher taxes, apparently. At least I have not moved and I currently pay more in local taxes than I do in federal income tax (mainly a 3% local property tax, a 3% local income tax).
Also, on accountability, the schools have done what every other public agency in the area did with their pensions. Figured out how much funding would be needed given a best-case scenario, underfund them even for the best-case scenario, and then ask for more money. I have a good reason for not trusting the numbers they provide on how much something actually costs.
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Yes, I know that the Progressives are different from the “progressives” of today (hence the curly quotes).
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I’m not sure about data re: Nov. v. April elections and school levies.
I don’t know of any specific research on that topic either, but I’ve always believed the same as Laura. Here they use off-year elections for local offices and the low turn-out makes it a very different game.
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I couldn’t agree more. It’s time for an educational bailout — funds going directly to the public schools. My county had to make 100 million dollars in budget cuts this year. It’s terrible.
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I was proposing that US government bailout the nation’s schools, not just NJ. Every state in the country is dealing with these same problems.
Yes, taxes are super high in this state. But it’s not only because of schools. It’s because of the small towns and the redundancy of services. Teacher benefits are nothing compared to other public employees in this state.
Once you reach retirement and are under a certain income, property taxes are frozen. So, most seniors wouldn’t have even be impacted by a tax increase. They may pay higher taxes than other states, but their homes are worth six times as much as comparable homes in other states. A house that they paid $5,000 for in the early 70s is now worth $500,000. They can sell their home and get a really posh condo in Boca. Their local taxes also give them a ton of local services, including a seniors-only pool in town swim club.
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I read that same article and of course, we have similar problems around here. The problem MH points out about credentialing is really galling to me. I have a Ph.D. and I can’t teach in a public school without two more years of schooling on my own nickel. I’m perfectly willing to take a lower salary, get lots of on-the-job training, even willing to get the degree while I’m working, but I’m not seeing anyone in any state offering these kinds of deals. Also, some of the non-profit and for-profit ventures that work with the public schools require teacher certification, so I can’t even serve in other capacities. Frustrating as hell. I may decide to get certification if the independent school avenue doesn’t pay off. I want to teach, and I find it frustrating that I can’t do so in certain places.
As for the tax thing, I’ve seen these questions show up on November ballots. Around here, they still get voted down.
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Laura’s last comment reminds me of why I want to wait until after the riots before any further bailouts.
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The above was to hostess Laura, not Geekymom Laura.
I have a Ph.D. and I can’t teach in a public school without two more years of schooling on my own nickel.
I could be more than that in PA. You basically have to redo the BA in education, so you’d only get credit for your undergraduate work where it overlapped with the BA.
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Two years ago we finally passed a school levy on the third try. We did it by focusing on voter turn-out. We knew if we could get people to the polls, we would win, so we really just focused on doing that. Nevertheless, the school board did a lot of things to try and convince people–held over 50 “coffee hours” with teachers and administrators to talk to the public about the levy and why we needed it, _tried_ to explain that seniors would pay absolutely no extra money in taxes. Those efforts yielded NOTHING. No one’s mind was changed and you couldn’t convince some people that their taxes wouldn’t go up (even though they wouldn’t!) It made much more sense to channel that energy into a GOTV effort.
I agree that busting on the teachers’ unions is a bit of a misplaced effort sometimes. Schools have huge, inefficient administrations. One of the problems in getting the levy passed was that people didn’t trust the schools to spend the money appropriately. How many vice-principals does one really need? Administrators are often notoriously inept teachers (failing up–the peter principle, etc.) as well. (Can you tell I’m the daughter of the 8th grade teacher and not the principal?) There is all this talk of merit pay for teachers and evaluating them, but I don’t here a lot of discussion about administration or administrators, who are usually the people evaluating the teachers. A bad principal or even just an ineffective one can prevent many good teachers from being effective. Poor administration and too much administration sucks up a lot of our school dollars.
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You basically have to redo the BA in education
I’m not sure what you mean, exactly, MH, but looking on the web pages of the Penn and Temple schools of education it looks as if one can get teacher certification in one year, either through a M.Ed. or even a non-degree program if one has a BA already. It might take longer for some subjects, depending on the background training one has, but that doesn’t seem unreasonable. It might be that what’s taught is worthless garbage- I really don’t know- but teaching is a skill and the skills needed are different at different levels, so I’m not opposed to this. You can also, apparently, get a sort of temporary (3 year) teaching license in PA at Temple that allows those with sufficient background to teach while they are working on their regular teaching credentials. This doesn’t seem like an unreasonably strict program to me.
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The one reformist agenda I agree with is a change in the teacher certification procedures. I’m pro-teacher (and even pro-teacher union), but the certification procedures have devolved into nothing more than a barrier to entry (and, I believe, this is their purpose, because allowing entry would diminish the power of current teachers).
We shouldn’t confound the guild-monopoly argument with adequate training and qualifications (even if we think there’s some rationale to making entry barriers higher).
BTW, I think that state certification of doctors is ridiculous, and produces similar barriers.
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I think answering the turnout question (april v november, or just turnout itself) is important because I think “progressives” (and remember I’m one) because it might be an excuse — the assumption that if people disagree with you, it must mean that there was a hidden majority that just didn’t make their voices heard). It’s a common fault and I want to avoid it, if it can’t be backed up by evidence.
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Today we have the technology available to make major changes to the way we vote. I find it frustrating that tradition seems to dictate how and when we vote and levy taxes. In most Massachusetts towns not only do we have endless elections on Mondays and Tuesdays, but we have budgets run by town meeting. What is that you ask? The most inefficient way to run any local government. Not only do residents have to be available to vote on ballot issues, but also sit through town meetings (held each spring on a series of weeknights) and vote on all the budget items. The meetings often go on until 10:30/11:00, so the parents of small children generally cannot both attend. For tax levies, passage at town meeting is not enough, the levy must then be put on a special election ballot and voted on AGAIN.
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MH, but looking on the web pages of the Penn and Temple schools of education it looks as if one can get teacher certification in one year,
Yes, it looks like they have changed that since I was last unemployed or Pittsburgh Public Schools sets the bar higher than the state requirments.
You can also, apparently, get a sort of temporary (3 year) teaching license in PA at Temple that allows those with sufficient background to teach while they are working on their regular teaching credentials.
To do that, you have to already have a job as a teacher. In other words, you have to know somebody or nobody certified has to want the job. It’s not nothing, and it’s always been there, but it is still a high bar.
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we have voting on school levies in November, and it didn’t help. The last one was voted down by a narrow margin, so the next steps are as for NJ: massive cuts to all special ed and electives, teacher layoffs, reduced school hours, and so on. This is as Laura observes country-wide. Our new county superintendent comes from New Mexico, where she had to make millions of dollars worth of cuts last year, with more in the schedule for this year.
Of course this is a reflexive-Republican county (we elected Mike Coffman), so anything at all with taxes gets voted down. November or April, down it goes.
To harry’s point, “school boards are largely populated by people who know next to nothing about education” – we had a school board with actual educators on it, but they weren’t good at politics. So they have been replaced by a full slate of partisan Republicans, running on a platform of reducing taxes and increasing accountability. We may have to start home schooling.
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massive cuts to all special ed and electives
Of course, they always do it that way. When Pittsburgh went broke, they cut parks and closed all the pools*. It is very rare that any public agency faces cuts and thinks, “How can we best provide for the people who use our services with fewer resources?” It’s always, “What can we cut that is so popular/needed that we can worm out of having to make cuts? Failing that, how can we best spite the people who pay our salaries, but didn’t give us everything we wanted?”
*Expecting, correctly, that private charity would fund those while private charity might not have been so kind in providing for the jobs of the brain trust that didn’t notify anybody that the city was broke until after the last possible minute.
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Thanks for the mention of Temple. I am in PA as a matter of fact. The program can be completed in a year going full time, including summer, but you’d have to pay for it–which isn’t nothing. So maybe I’ll get to that point.
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UWashington’s MiT (Master’s in Teaching) program takes 2 years, with the 2nd being spent in a mentored teaching position (with the assumption that a student will have been hired as a teacher at that point). They’ve had issues this year because of a lack of jobs for the “internship” period.
They also require that you have appropriate coursework for your specialty, and it’s unclear exactly what classes from an undergraduate/graduate degree would count (for example, to teach HS english or history or german).
I do think teachers need instruction on teaching, and especially so if they are teaching developmentally volatile children (i.e. special needs, young, and your run of the mill teenager). But, I think that a 1-2 year post-grad degree, after a degree in a major is the right way to go for HS teaching. Not sure what I think for elementary, where knowledge of child development might play a greater role.
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Not sure what I think for elementary
Xanax and the complete works of Dr. Suess.
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Not sure what I think for elementary
Xanax and the complete works of Dr. Suess.
Yeah, that works for us. But, I’m hoping for better from the teachers.
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Highly fun article about Jersey in the new Economist:
http://www.economist.com/world/united-states/displaystory.cfm?story_id=16007361
“Is it wrong to love another man?” asked Rush Limbaugh, a talk-radio host. “Because I love Chris Christie.”
““The Soprano State”, and it is not referring to the local opera.
New Jersey’s problem is not just that Tony Soprano and his pals have muscled in, grumble Mr Ingle and Ms McClure. It is also that government in the state “often acts like the mob. It beats up taxpayers and leaves them somewhere in an alley to fend for themselves.””
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‘nother mash note for Christie
http://thehill.com/opinion/columnists/ab-stoddard/97603-nj-gov-sets-tone-for-us
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