Financing Public Education
Song: “Money, money, money, money. Mooooney.” Come on now, sing it in your head. ;)
Money. It appears to make the world go round and everyone
wants more of it, educational institutions included. And so began my week in
class…
We discussed financing in education this week, if you hadn’t
already guessed. I really hope you have that song stuck in your head now. I
typed it out for you so would have to suffer the same torture as me. I cannot
get it out of my head. It can play through your head and add a certain ambiance
to my blog as you read it.
I really hope that someone who is reading this blog is
laughing with me… ahh… to be funny… what a gift. I am jealous of those of you
who have been so blessed with the gift of natural humour.
However, in all seriousness financing in education is an
extremely important topic. And expensive…
There is a compelling dilemma in our public education
system… and that is finding enough money to pay well-educated professionals to
do the very important job of educating the youth of our society. In addition,
as education becomes an increasingly complex service, it is also becoming more
expensive.
People who like to refer to the “good ol’ days” when
education wasn’t so complicated or expensive also tend to forget the staggering
statistics. A large percentage of students never graduated, post-secondary
education was rare, education for students with disabilities was non-existent,
and differentiated instruction was some kind of far off incomprehensible idea
(What, you mean to say not all children can learn from reading and memorizing a
textbook?). So the people who have a
love affair with the “good ol’ days” tend to wear their rose tinted glasses and
fail to recognize the progress that is occurring and has occurred in education.
But I have a feeling trying to change the “good ol days” people would be about
as productive as trying to hammer a nail with a hammer made of styrofoam.
The optimist in me, however, really does believe that
despite what the naysayers would have you believe that our education system
really is improving. My family could attest to this… On my mother’s side of the
family neither of my grandparents attained higher than a grade 8 or 9
education. Only one of my aunts graduated from high school and my mother
completed her GED (an accomplishment I am extremely proud of her for). My mom’s
4 other siblings did not graduate from high school. However, all of my cousins
have graduated from high school but one. A handful have went on to college or
are working on university degrees. I was the first person in my mom’s family to
graduate with a university degree. To me that is progress. Exciting progress;
our school system is doing something right.
However, despite this progress the public school system is
facing new challenges, quite a diverse number challenges really but the one I’d
like to focus on is the financial challenges the education system is facing.
Income is not increasing at the rate that the cost of education is. This is a
big problem. An unsustainable problem.
The public school system is funded from local taxes and
provincial funding. Local taxes are collected by the school board via property
taxes. This antiquated system has served our country relatively well for a
sustained amount of time, but some would argue is a flawed system. Particularly,
because of the high amounts of property taxes farmers pay. In addition, every
year school boards are scurrying trying to find ways to cut their budgets, but
still require tax increases nonetheless.
Teachers are not paid a crazy amount of money for what they
do. Considering their education and high level of responsibility, many might
even argue they are underpaid. However, this is a separate discussion… That
being said wages take up the largest percentage of a school board budget, and
wages are not increasing at the rate that expenditures are. Hmmm another
problem… A complex problem.
In class we all participated in a role playing activity in
small groups. We were asked to try and find ways to cut a mock school board
budget by 1.2 million dollars. This proved to be an excessively challenging
task. And lead to me asking a big question (much to the dismay of my
classmates): Why are not looking for alternative sources of revenue?
Trying to always be cutting a budget is not realistic in a
world where the cost of everything else in constantly rising. In fact, it is
non-sensical. There is always room for efficiency skimming, I would argue. As
there are always inefficiencies in any large agency. However, trying to cut a
budget every year by millions of dollars when 57% percent of that budget is
taken up from wages is simply not sustainable. Either teachers are indeed over
paid (which the good ol’ day’ers would have you believe) or we need to find a
new way to think about funding education. Increasing taxes year after year is
not sustainable either.
In class I asked why we couldn’t be more business minded in
our funding approaches to education. I pointed out in our mock activity that we
really only needed another $133 per student. I argued that $33 dollars of that
could be considered efficiency skimming but asked why we couldn’t find a way to
come up with the other $100 per student. This lead to me making several poor
suggestions for how we could get the extra money (which I felt embarrassed
about even suggesting afterwards but honest, I was just thinking on the spot)
because as it turned out I couldn’t think of any good ways to make my idea come
to fruition.
This led me to the discussion I had with my fiancé that
inspired me to write this blog on a Saturday night. As we drove the hour long
drive to my parent’s house he listened to me talk about what I had learned in
class… and the questions I had raised… and the bad ideas I had shared. He
thought it was a good idea to consider alternative ways to fund schools but
agreed with my professor and the flaws she pointed out in my thinking about how
such changes could be integrated into a school. And it’s true, they both are
right: education needs to be a publically funded endeavour because going to
school needs to be an equal opportunity endeavour.
