Colorado Springs: A Teabagger Paradise

[cinyc]

Liberals just don't get it.  Raising taxes isn't the answer to everything.  In an economic downturn, families tighten their belts to live within their means.  The local government should too.  That they seem to think they should be able to raise taxes and live high off the hog when their citizens are hurting is just plain dumb - and a good way to get themselves voted out of office.

When faced with the situation where residents can't afford and don't want to pay more, local governments almost always threaten cut back on the visible things, seemingly out of spite, to make those ungrateful bastards who pay their salaries give them more money.  Instead of asking whether the mayor and the council really need multiple assistants, secretaries, and secretaries to those assistants, they threaten to cut parks, police and fire.  

There is a lot of bloat in government that has been cut in private sector businesses and can be cut there, too.  Especially in education, where there's this stupid emphasis on class size (read: more teachers for the teachers' union) instead of leveraging technological advances to make our kids smarter at a lower cost.  

[cinyc]

Where is the waste?  Where is this gross lack of efficiency?

I want real, concrete evidence.  Numbers.  Not just platitudes that Rush Limbaugh told you.

What?  Teachers make too much money?  They're just whiny?  What is it?

How do you envision schools?  Where should the cuts come from?

My school district spends 75% of its general fund money in the classroom (teachers, textbooks, supplies, desks).. the other 25% pays for administration, janitors, and extracurricular stuff as well as heavily subsidizing the transportation budget since that is determined by number of students rather than number of miles driven.

Our school district reduced the number of teachers by 25% in 3 years due to budget cuts and class sizes grew from 20 to just under 30.  Test scores also went down.

The community came together and passed a property tax hike to restore funding for new school buses (the district hadn't purchased any new ones in 5 years), all day, everyday kindergarten, and smaller class sizes.  Class sizes are now back down in the low 20s range and test scores are improving.

The crime is that we have had to pay it through much higher property taxes... because the state has ignored its constitutional duty to provide a system of uniform public schools.

So, since you seem to know so much about the efficiency in our schools.. where, EXACTLY, should the cuts be made?

Teaching methods today are largely the same as they have been for the past two centuries - a person at the front of the classroom lecturing students.  Innovation is stifled by teachers unions and the public school monopoly.  Giving parents vouchers to send their children to whatever school they want would break that monopoly and allow for innovation - allow for technology and long-distance learning to substitute for teachers, where appropriate - which, in my opinion, is more often than teachers unions would want.   Substituting capital for labor to run things more efficiently seems to happen in every industry but most governments.  Productivity increases in the real world, but rarely in the government world, where ever more and more union employees are hired and given benefits that few in the real world have, like guaranteed pensions and tenure.