Education Spending and the Legislature

I'm sorry for the link posting, but I am yet again (what is this the tenth time this season?) battling a stinking cold.

Wondering what the legislature has done to fix education spending (and property taxes) this session - one of their campaign promises?

Vermont Tiger has the low down and it's not pretty.

As one of my callers said on Friday's She's Right, hopefully people will get mad enough when they get their property tax bills that they will finally want to hold someone accountable for this.

But, hey, at least the legislature held hearings on things they can do something about, like global warming and troop withdrawal from Iraq.

By the way, the podcast of Friday's show is up here.

It's so cliche, but it is the spending (stupid)

There is a story in the Free Press this morning about the legislative hearings on property tax.

Jim Stevens, 67, is retired, but works two part-time jobs as a mail carrier and bus driver to supplement his retirement income. He said he and his wife live on less than $24,000 a year in a home they purchased in Newark six years ago.

Thursday he drove to Montpelier with some of his neighbors to complain about the growing burden of his property taxes.

"My tax has gone up 53 percent since I came here," he told members of the House Education and Ways and Means committees, the two House panels charged with examining ways to curb school spending and property tax growth. "I don't know why you have to tax us to death."

When he thought lawmakers weren't paying close enough attention to the testimony, Stevens raised his voice. "Do you hear me? Do you hear the people who are talking?" he asked. "I'm not trying to tell you a sob story. I'm trying to tell you what is going on."

Stories like this are typical here. I remember that first time I ran for City Council and went door-to-door, I heard story after story of senior citizens who were being taxed beyond their means. One woman was almost in tears, wondering if she would have to sell her home. And that was in 2003. Taxes have increased substantially since then.

One commonly offered solution is a shift from property taxes to an income tax.

Rep. Harvey Otterman, R-Topsham, promoted greater reliance on the income tax in his testimony, noting the value of people's property doesn't represent ability to pay taxes. "The income tax is the one tax that does represent your ability to pay."

I agree that property tax is not a good indicator of ability to pay. I also know that the excessive property tax burden can make home ownership cost prohibitive for some people.

However, I caution people about embracing an income tax as the panacea for the school spending dilemma. If we do not get the spending under control, the income tax levels will inevitably creep up, even for those who cannot afford it.

According to this compilation of census data, the median income in Vermont for a full-time, year-round working male is only $32,457, and for a female that figure is $25,322. That means half of Vermonters make less than that.

If school spending continues to increase at current levels, the income tax will hit all Vermonters hard in a matter of no time.

When Act 68 was passed, it temporarily took the focus off the dollar amounts of the school budgets. Any new change in the funding mechanism could have the same effect. Hey, I'm not going to pay it, so of course I'll vote "yes."

What happens when the budgets get so big that the families who are just scraping by have to pick up part of the tab? Will the school budgets go back down?

This year, the Burlington School District is asking for a 9.08% increase. Our population is not growing at that rate. Our incomes are not growing at that rate. We cannot afford to sustain that rate of growth, regardless of the funding mechanism.

We need to control school spending.

The question is, will lawmakers take that seriously?

The "Inconvenient Truth" Movie You Must See

This post has a little something for everyone - a homeschool tie-in, a local tie-in, and a national tie-in, so I am posting it on She's Right (my political blog) and Crafty Mama's Homeschool (my homeschooling/crafting blog).

Yesterday, I was reading one of my favorite homeschool blogs, Why Homeschool, and they had a link to an interview with Oak Norton, a father of five from Utah, who is fighting to get good, old fashioned math back in the schools there.

He now publishes a single-frame comic on the website Weapons of Math Destruction.

A little background, from Norton, about the problem (from the edspresso interview):

A few years ago my oldest daughter was finishing up her third grade year and at a parent/teacher conference I asked her teacher when they were going to start learning the times tables since they hadn’t yet and I’d done it nearly thirty years earlier in third grade.

The teacher replied, “Oh, we don’t do that anymore.” [pause for picking my jaw off the ground]

“You don’t do that anymore?”

“That’s right, it’s not part of the curriculum.”

“Well then how do you expect the children to learn their times tables?”

“Well,” she thoughtfully paused, “the smart kids will just pick it up as they go.” This time my jaw cracked hard when it hit the ground and I was off to the principal’s office.

The principal explained that although this method was different from how we had grown up, there were problems with traditional math and all the research showed kids were really excelling under these discovery learning methods. I left with a serious intestinal problem and promptly purchased Singapore math workbooks and flashcards for my children to make sure they knew their basic facts.

I was reading through the WMD archive, I noticed a familiar curriculum: MathLand. Wait. That's what they use in Burlington.

As it turns out, MathLand is one of the not-really-math math programs that is responsible for dumbing-down our kids here in America.

And they do use it in Burlington. In other words, they want us to approve a spending of almost $11,000 per pupil, but the kids will likely leave without a mastery of mathematics. (Don't worry, I am working on a school budget post.)

Thankfully, for me and my kids, the curriculum we use, Saxon, is one of the programs recommended by the WMD site. It focuses on - gasp! - rote memorization of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division facts AND the correct answer matters!

Why does all this - My math is better. No my math is better - matter? It just so happens, I came across a You Tube video, called "Math Education: An Inconvenient Truth," (Hat Tip: Chanman) where examples from two leading fuzzy math texts are given (you won't believe how profoundly stupid this is) and the real world implications for our children's future.

The video is 15 minutes long, but you really have to see it to believe it. It is worse than you thought.

It is no secret that the United States lags behind the rest of the world in Math and Science Education. Watch this and you'll see why.

Both the woman on the You Tube video (which is a quality video - she's a TV weather woman) and Oak Norton recommend picking up Singapore Math to supplement your children at home.

On a side note: Did you know there is a name for that? Afterschooling. You know American Education is screwed when supplementing your child's education is so prevalent that there is a name for it.