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

[Ban my account ffs!]

Several Republicans in the legislature have already talked about submitting what will effectively be a 23% cut in education funding for the next biennium.

Of course Gov. Dayton will veto that since state law would prevent school districts from raising property taxes to make up for the costs and the cuts would cause class sizes to rise to 50+ students per teacher.  Such an immense cut might even be seen as unconstitutional since it is written in the constitution that the state must provide a general and uniformly thorough and efficient system of public schools.

Essentially... we're very very lucky to have elected a DFLer as governor.  I pity the children living in Florida.  Or anybody really who isn't a wealthy CEO.

[Ban my account ffs!]

The fact is that the days of public employees receiving much more lavish pay and benefits than those who pay their salaries must come to an end.  Public employee pension and benefit spending will bankrupt state and local governments if it does not.

Those who understand that will do well politically in the next few decades.  Those beholden to the ultimate of special interests - public employee unions who buy politicians to line their own pockets with unsustainable levels of pay, pensions and benefits - will not.  The tired "but it's for the children" canard will not work well when voters begin to see right through the farce.

Just because you don't have enough backbone to organize and demand better wages doesn't mean you should drag everybody down to your level.

Just what do you propose teachers be paid?  Nobody will become a teacher for the kinds of wages/benefits you and other contemptuous Republicans propose.

You just need a scapegoat for your own misery... first it was the private sector union employees... you've done well busting those.. now you've turned to the public sector in your quest to transfer the work of the many into the wealth of the few.

[Ban my account ffs!]

The fact is that the days of public employees receiving much more lavish pay and benefits than those who pay their salaries must come to an end.

Couldn't agree more. The wages and benefits of the private sector need to dramatically increase.

Always such an optimist, Nym

[Ban my account ffs!]

It's a way to reward the union supporters. That's why national teacher:student ratios are lower today than they were during the Clinton Presidency, and why government education spending has more than doubled since 1990.

By what measure has spending doubled since 1990?

Is it your argument that the entire increase is because of union pressures?

I don't know the data you're using, but I can tell you that the student body in America is much larger today than it was in 1990 (baby bust years), and much more linguistically diverse, and spending much more on special needs students who were neglected before.

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/downchart_gs.php?year=1990_2015&view=1&expand=&units=k&fy=fy11&chart=20-total&bar=1&stack=1&size=m&title=&state=US&color=c&local=s

Education
Fiscal Years 1990 to 2015 Year GDP-US
$ billion (2005) Education -total
$ bln 2005
1990 422.34
2010 825.98


We know of course that student teacher ratios have declined tremendously from historical levels.

http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d09/tables/dt09_064.asp

Amazing how teachers are one of the few professions that has become less productive over the years. Such spending would at least be somewhat rational if it was correlated with increased achievement....but it isn't.

Using the same chart, I found that education spending as a percentage of GDP (Pk-12) has not changed since at least 1980 and is projected to fall dramatically in the next 5 years to record lows.

Try again.

[Ban my account ffs!]

So... spending as a percentage of GDP has remained the same while enrollment has increased... AND class sizes have shrunk.

What gives?  Teachers traditionally have not taken big raises... so they remain one of the lowest paid professions for their education level.

The right's demonization of teachers is really odd.. but not surprising.  They have to blame somebody for their misery.

[Ban my account ffs!]

So you're debating semantics of the word "investment" vs. "wasteful big government spending" vs. the more neutral "spending"? Re-reading your posts in this thread, you should be the last one criticising the use of cliched buzzwords and sloganeering.

Beyond that, we get it: "Government bad". Hopefully we'll get rid of public education soon or at least reduce it to a shell of what its been post-war. Surely then we will recover our economic edge from China and India.

I'm not debating semantics, no. I'm debating the ridiculous liberal assumptions that extra education spending is automatically a good thing, that the country needs more of it, and that student achievement is somehow correlated directly with this spending in proportion to the amount of extra spending.


You simply assume it to be true. That's your ideological position, which is at least tolerable if we could afford it, but we can't. It would be amusing if the doubling of real education spending since 1990 had worked, but it hasn't.

I don't know how or why spending increases can simply happen, and have happened, while spending cuts have to be justified with much more evidence than the leftists are willing to provide. When did the world become so backwards?

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.

[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.