Quote:
Originally Posted by Penske 2.0
I have seen the budgets for similarly sized Seattle public schools, and there is a lot of flab, mostly in the wages category. Administrative excess and waste. and Unions. That said, I would be in favour of significantly higher taxes to fund schools if there were appropriate budget controls and performance metrics put into place.
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The experience of Washington D.C. suggests that the flab is there because voters want it. Michelle Rhee came in and tried to cut administrative excess and waste, and to move teachers to performance-based compensation. For her efforts, she got Adrian Fenty unelected, largely because District residents who did not have kids in DCPS did not like the cuts, which they saw as axing jobs.
The problem is essentially the same as the way military spending gets hijacked as pork. In a democracy, you will never make it go away, because it's what a lot of voters want. If you stand on that objection, you either get ignored, or you ensure that nothing ever happens to improve things, depending on how much clout you have.
Blaming this on the teachers unions is silly. It's like blaming defense contractors charging what they can. Ultimately, as AG says, the problem is with the voters who want things this way, or are too inattentive to do something to change things.
