FL governor has deep cuts to education, while doubling his office

[krazen1211]

Nobody argued that more funding is always better.

Adequate and appropriate funding is always better, on the other hand.  In my own state, per pupil funding for children has fallen in the past 8 years as a systemic tax-cuts created eternal budget shortfall has meant per pupil funding has not kept up with inflation.  And inflation in school districts has been higher than for the public at large because of increased insurance and transportation costs (especially after 9/11) which cannot be cut like teaching staff.

In one year, from 2002/03, to 2003/04, my school district cut 50 of 350 teaching staff.  The teacher to student ratio hit 20 students/1.  That includes special ed classes where class sizes are understandably much lower.  Your regular classrooms reached 30+ after 4th grade and nearly every class at the high school not enrolling more than 30 students was cut from the curriculum, which disproportionally hurts Advanced Placement and other more rigorous courses.

Luckily the voters in my area saw what the cuts had meant and approved an operating levy of $500/student in fall 2003.  That allowed the district to reduce class sizes, purchase new buses (which had been put on hold for 2 years in our Rhode Island sized rural school district), and allowed for all day, every day Kindergarten.

That referendum was renewed in 2008.

The problem is:  School districts cannot just raise property taxes here like elsewhere.  This is because schools are chiefly funded at the state level from the general fund based on enrollment as well as equalization funding (which transfers money from property-rich districts to property-poor districts).

The GOP recently proposed what will amount to a 23% cut in state funding to education while refusing to give school districts more taxing power.  That means that school districts that don't get voter approved levy referendums passed or those that are already at the maximum amount (something like $1200/student)... will have to cut 23% out of their budgets.

When you consider that you can't cut much at all from a large chunk of the budget (like insurance and transportation costs), the cuts come disproportionately from staff.  Since 80% of education dollars go to the classroom (paying teachers, supplies, maintenance, etc)... that's where the cuts will come from.

If we are optimistic and assume teachers take a significant pay cut and supply budgets are reduced drastically, you're still looking at losing up to a third of teachers overnight.  This would be devastating to the schools, educational quality, and the local economy since such a reduction in staff would equate to a large manufacturer closing.

Is that the kind of thing you like to promote, Krazen?

Hurting the local economy, seriously sacrificing educational quality, and ruining the education for a generation of young Americans...

Because you hate the teachers' unions and don't want higher taxes for the already undertaxed elites?

You may get your way.  But it will be the last time conservatives win an election in a very very long time.

Curious, really, because the data that I have shows the following:

http://www.statemaster.com/graph/edu_ele_sec_pup_rat-elementary-secondary-pupil-teacher-ratio

#    15     Minnesota:   16.3 students per teacher



http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/downchart_gs.php?year=1996_2016&view=1&expand=&units=k&fy=fy12&chart=20-total&bar=1&stack=1&size=m&title=&state=MN&color=c&local=s


Education
Fiscal Years 1996 to 2016
Year   GDP-MN
$ billion (2005)   Education -total
$ bln 2005
1996   147.643   8.36   a
1997   168.194   9.34   a
1998   189.26   10.45   a
1999   197.81   11.11   a
2000   211.177   11.68   a
2001   212.802   12.00   i
2002   217.705   12.33   a
2003   225.073   12.43   a
2004   234.347   12.43   a
2005   238.367   12.05   a
2006   238.938   12.93   a
2007   240.548   13.38   a
2008   244.759   13.90



Kind of odd how they run out of funding with so much more than they had 5 years before 2003....

But in any case, its rather sad how you straitjacker yourself into your own conclusion. Special education enrollment and costs have ballooned since 1990, at least partially due to dubious classifications and bounty funding, and of course to reward some special interests. Not to mention of course that a bunch of your money is taken and given to Detroit and places like it, because, as you put it, some special interest decided to play Robin Hood.

It's not a surprise that failures continue to fail when they are rewarded with financial windfalls, and given that, not a surprise that we can double education spending over 20 years and get little for it except a bunch of excess pension and healthcare liabilities. It's no surprise either that Utah has had more success.

[Brittain33]

About 55% of state funding goes to 31 special designated districts. For each district you can drill down here.

http://education.state.nj.us/rc/rc09/menu/13.html


A high school in newark for example gets about 81% of its spending from the state. Paterson is sitting at about 83%.   Passaic city is sitting at 86%. Most of the suburbs are now sitting at 0.
established in 2002. They borrowed either  $6 or $8.4 billion, and as far as I can tell didn't actually build much in the way of schools.

I don't dispute that the lion's share of funding goes to the Abbott districts, and that they contribute relatively little to their own budgets. I'm asking for how this commitment stacks up in absolute terms to what the 90% of NJ taxpayers not living in those areas pay in property and income taxes. How much is state spending on education as a share of state and local spending in NJ? I am addressing the issue that these districts are the reason taxes in NJ are the highest in the country not the weaker assertions that they rely heavily on state aid and that they crowd out other districts for that state aid.

Secondly, what do you think the state should do for cities with effectively no tax base? Let their kids go to schools with a fraction the funding of what the suburbs to because they didn't pull on their bootstraps hard enough to choose more affluent parents, ignoring that there are huge non-English speaking communities in those cities where the parents aren't pushing kids to learn English? There is always going to be some state support for poor districts. Certainly some of it is wasted but you can't take the total amount and say it's all gone to waste, fraud, and abuse, or even most of it. There is no easy solution to educating kids in places where parents aren't alays in the picture. Bear in mind that teachers aren't apsiring for jobs in these districts.

[krazen1211]

About 55% of state funding goes to 31 special designated districts. For each district you can drill down here.

http://education.state.nj.us/rc/rc09/menu/13.html


A high school in newark for example gets about 81% of its spending from the state. Paterson is sitting at about 83%.   Passaic city is sitting at 86%. Most of the suburbs are now sitting at 0.
established in 2002. They borrowed either  $6 or $8.4 billion, and as far as I can tell didn't actually build much in the way of schools.

I don't dispute that the lion's share of funding goes to the Abbott districts, and that they contribute relatively little to their own budgets. I'm asking for how this commitment stacks up in absolute terms to what the 90% of NJ taxpayers not living in those areas pay in property and income taxes. How much is state spending on education as a share of state and local spending in NJ? I am addressing the issue that these districts are the reason taxes in NJ are the highest in the country not the weaker assertions that they rely heavily on state aid and that they crowd out other districts for that state aid.

Secondly, what do you think the state should do for cities with effectively no tax base? Let their kids go to schools with a fraction the funding of what the suburbs to because they didn't pull on their bootstraps hard enough to choose more affluent parents, ignoring that there are huge non-English speaking communities in those cities where the parents aren't pushing kids to learn English? There is always going to be some state support for poor districts. Certainly some of it is wasted but you can't take the total amount and say it's all gone to waste, fraud, and abuse, or even most of it. There is no easy solution to educating kids in places where parents aren't alays in the picture. Bear in mind that teachers aren't apsiring for jobs in these districts.

Incidentally, the waste in these districts is about 30%. Corzine was supposed to be a Nixon goes to China kind of guy here, and he had a bit of success here and there, but for the most part he got rolled.

http://www.nje3.org/?p=1327


http://www.nj.gov/treasury/omb/publications/98budget/pdf/bib.pdf

http://www.state.nj.us/treasury/omb/publications/08bib/pdf/bib.pdf


But these are the numbers. In 1998, New Jersey spent about $16 billion, out of which $5 billion  to what they categorized as 'education'. (Christie Whitman was engaging in a couple billion dollars worth of budgetary trickery here in other areas, but that's another story). By 2008, that had swelled to $34 billion, out of which $11 billion went to the same cause. Rutgers spending also doubled. The cost of state employee benefits more than doubled.

This of course is coupled with the more critical point that NJ had almost no private sector job growth over the time.

Somewhere in between those 2 years, the leftwinged hacks on the NJ Supreme Court decided that the Abbott people deserved to get 'free' preschool, and that they deserved to have 'new' 'free' schools built for them, and that age 5 actually meant age 3.


I'll have to poke through these charts further, later.

[Badger]

You are again, markedly ignorant is "liberal assumptions". No one, myself included, is claiming increased educational spending "automatically" improves educational performance. My distinction is with your claim that any correlation is largely mythical. Conservatives like to repeat the mantra about "not solving a problem by throwing money at it" (especially education), but usually do so when they're trying to justify starving education of funding.

In the off chance you're not a college student whose read Atlas Shrugged one too many times, if YOUR kids were about to have a substantial increase in their student to teacher ratio, cuts in computer services, continuing use of outdated textbooks for several more years, reduction in the number of courses taught, reductions in college prop course availability, and planned on hiring teachers at lower salaries (which obviously means better candidates go to other schools), etc, etc. would you still have no concerns about your child's schooling?

Anyone who claims the bolded is usually full of it, because real education spending has doubled in the last 20 years. A mere reduction to historically appropriate norms is both correct and needed. But what more do you expect from the people who have been pimping increases in education spending and teacher enrollment for the same 20 years despite the data showing that's relatively unimportant?

When I went to school, classroom sizes were closer to 20 than 15, just as they are in the rest of the world. No problems there. Of course, my home state of New Jersey spends much more money paying off the union bloat of the Whitman/Greevery/Corzine era than it does on anything, well, useful.

But you're just making up stuff, really, as evidenced by paragraph 2. No facts, just appeals to emotion that aren't even really true. But then again, that's what you started posting in this thread with, so I'm done here.

I can't help noticing you completely ducked my query about real world application of your theories to your own children's education. The questions remain.

[krazen1211]

Anyone who claims the bolded is usually full of it, because real education spending has doubled in the last 20 years. A mere reduction to historically appropriate norms is both correct and needed. But what more do you expect from the people who have been pimping increases in education spending and teacher enrollment for the same 20 years despite the data showing that's relatively unimportant?

When I went to school, classroom sizes were closer to 20 than 15, just as they are in the rest of the world. No problems there. Of course, my home state of New Jersey spends much more money paying off the union bloat of the Whitman/Greevery/Corzine era than it does on anything, well, useful.

But you're just making up stuff, really, as evidenced by paragraph 2. No facts, just appeals to emotion that aren't even really true. But then again, that's what you started posting in this thread with, so I'm done here.

I can't help noticing you completely ducked my query about real world application of your theories to your own children's education. The questions remain.

I don't have any problems with my children being in classrooms that are about 50% larger if it means the savings can be channeled back to the taxpayers.

[Ban my account ffs!]

Anyone who claims the bolded is usually full of it, because real education spending has doubled in the last 20 years. A mere reduction to historically appropriate norms is both correct and needed. But what more do you expect from the people who have been pimping increases in education spending and teacher enrollment for the same 20 years despite the data showing that's relatively unimportant?

When I went to school, classroom sizes were closer to 20 than 15, just as they are in the rest of the world. No problems there. Of course, my home state of New Jersey spends much more money paying off the union bloat of the Whitman/Greevery/Corzine era than it does on anything, well, useful.

But you're just making up stuff, really, as evidenced by paragraph 2. No facts, just appeals to emotion that aren't even really true. But then again, that's what you started posting in this thread with, so I'm done here.

I can't help noticing you completely ducked my query about real world application of your theories to your own children's education. The questions remain.

I don't have any problems with my children being in classrooms that are about 50% larger if it means the savings can be channeled back to the taxpayers.

Why not just get rid of the schools altogether?  Then you can get your $1500 back from the taxes you pay for your child's education and pay $5-7k in tuition to a private school.  We'll see just who benefits here.

[Badger]

Anyone who claims the bolded is usually full of it, because real education spending has doubled in the last 20 years. A mere reduction to historically appropriate norms is both correct and needed. But what more do you expect from the people who have been pimping increases in education spending and teacher enrollment for the same 20 years despite the data showing that's relatively unimportant?

When I went to school, classroom sizes were closer to 20 than 15, just as they are in the rest of the world. No problems there. Of course, my home state of New Jersey spends much more money paying off the union bloat of the Whitman/Greevery/Corzine era than it does on anything, well, useful.

But you're just making up stuff, really, as evidenced by paragraph 2. No facts, just appeals to emotion that aren't even really true. But then again, that's what you started posting in this thread with, so I'm done here.

I can't help noticing you completely ducked my query about real world application of your theories to your own children's education. The questions remain.

I don't have any problems with my children being in classrooms that are about 50% larger if it means the savings can be channeled back to the taxpayers.

Why not just get rid of the schools altogether?  Then you can get your $1500 back from the taxes you pay for your child's education and pay $5-7k in tuition to a private school.  We'll see just who benefits here.

Aaaaaannnnndddd Snowguywinsthread

[krazen1211]

Why not just get rid of the schools altogether?  Then you can get your $1500 back from the taxes you pay for your child's education and pay $5-7k in tuition to a private school.  We'll see just who benefits here.

Where the hell did you come up with this fictional crap? Property taxes in New Jersey hit 5 figures on any reasonably sized home that isn't in one of the Democratic cities.

[phk]

Latest regression evidence I found.

TestScore = 698.9-2.28*STR
TestScore = 686.0-1.10*STR -0.65*PctEL