Quote:
Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
It's easy to figure out how to ruin good schools. Just squeeze their funding.
It's much harder to figure out how to make schools better. Spending more money can help, but certainly isn't sufficient. If it was clear what to do, I think you would see individual towns -- except in California, where the conservatives prevent it -- making the various investments and changes to get better schools, because having a reputation for good schools is worth a huge amount to property values, etc.
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I went to a fundraiser for (70% possible) gubenatorial Chris Bell a few weeks ago and someone asked him about school financing. It's a huge deal here, as a court has ordered the legislature to Do. Something. About. School. Financing. One of the common responses by the GOP to cries of increasing funding for education is that the money will get wasted.
Chris Bell said that makes some sense, but at the same time, he has a lot of acquaintances who send their kids to the private schools here in Houston. Parents gladly pay $13-17,000 in tutition to send their kids to those schools, and the schools have additional funding through grants, gifts and endowments, and there's a marked difference in performance on all measurements. The point was, to some extent, money
is a factor. My application driven private school had 100% graduation and college rate in my class.
This is not to say that I have any interest at all in my property taxes going up.
