For example, I might have claimed that teacher salaries shouldn’t be the area that funding for public school restroom supplies should come from when other money was being wasted by the system. Or that it wasn’t reasonable to expect teachers to be held more responsible for maintenance than it was to hold the people who were being paid to do maintenance responsible, but I don’t think I’ve ever made the case that taking more money from the taxpayers was the answer. I’ve NEVER believed that the total amount collected was the problem.

(I own up to asserting that I didn’t think you could just renege on teacher retirement as a way to address shortfalls, but you could fix that with allocating funds differently rather than straight up increasing the tax burden if honoring state contracts had any value.)

Was the 20,000 saved or was it wasted? You have a self-interest in claiming “saved” to make a case for shifting your private school burden onto other payers with a voucher, but it’s hard to make the case to the other people who had to pay for it that it reflected any savings or that any expectation that they will pay less, rather than more, if vouchers are implemented would be reasonable. It creates a direct entitlement for you to the voucher, but guarantees nothing about what could be collected from taxpayers in the name of school funding.

Why do you want to stay in this “only unlimited parent choice vouchers” or the present system loop? It’s an either/or fallacy in a way.

“n my district, the amount of money we could collect from the state would be down by two for Ragnarok’s kids, which would be significant in terms mainly of allocated teacher pay if they happened to be the particular kid who pushed the average over to earning enough to pay another teacher: the 25th if the state cap was 24 say, or if it was a year we were allocated state funds for new textbooks. In most cases, two kids being gone really wouldn’t make an appreciable difference in what was actually spent at that school that year. The teachers would be employed; the air conditioning would still be on; and extra textbooks would probably sit in the book room.”

There are fixed costs and variable costs. The fixed costs are step functions (you need one classroom whether you have 1 or 24 students, two classrooms), the variable costs change with every student. So this argument could be used to say to public schools that after the first student, they’d only get variable costs for each new student. Right? So you’re further weakening the public school case for mo’ money, mo’ money, all the time, rain or shine.

Yes, I understand that the state didn’t give me back my money. Yes, my honest politicos spent it elsewhere – shock! horror! But it’s nonetheless money that was saved.

“In Georgia, with unrestricted parent choice, we’d probably end up with the School for Perpetuating Athletic Eligibility and the School for Maximizing your Social Security Disability Benefits…”

Yes, as opposed to the Public Schools to Maximize Teacher Pay, the Public Schools to Maximize Fraud, and the Public Schools to Maximize Ignorance.

BTW, I read Nancy Flanagan’s screed. Hard to see what the fuss is about. There are the usual “accepted truths” (teachers are grievously underpaid), the usual comparisons to university professors and engineers, the ever-present plea for more money. Nowhere did I see anything about getting rid of bad teachers or running schools more efficiently.

Individual parents care about what they see as the best interest of their kids, but they don’t have much interest in the common good it seems to me these days. There’s going to have to be something built into the voucher system that guarantees benefits to the folks who pay without kids in the system.

I think voucher proponents are assuming that I say that as a way to prevent vouchers from being implemented. I don’t. I say it because it’s what’s missing from the advantages of vouchers as they are presently discussed.

In Georgia, with unrestricted parent choice, we’d probably end up with the School for Perpetuating Athletic Eligibility and the School for Maximizing your Social Security Disability Benefits, as well as racist and religious segregation academies of various stripes, none of which would be focused on academic instruction.

Why not build into the system a way to prevent that from happening?

The money following the kid to something equally as bad instructionally doesn’t represent improvement and might not represent a “savings.”

I may have goofed by mentioning the local district in my comment to Ragnarok, but actual spending on public education didn’t change by 20,000 because of his children weren’t enrolled, did it? That may be one of the perverse things about it, but don’t kid yourself about “savings.”

To put it another way, while you seemed to have “cost” your district 20,000 dollars in funds they didn’t get because they didn’t need them to educate your kids, who “saved” anything?

Is there a way to return unspent money to the other taxpayers in your state?

Here’s the thing about attendance based funding though, unless your neighbors got refunds, the actual cost to other taxpayers didn’t change, so it’s hard to see it as a “savings” to the other people paying taxes. (And I’m guessing that you understood that even when you made your comment about schools staying open with no kids. No they wouldn’t stay open, but oddly, it’s not like anyone would give money back to the people who paid for the schools.)

What I suspect happened in that the state held onto the money and spent it as it chose (maybe to send it to a different part of the state where enrollment went up by two kids after money was allocated to education by the legislature). But you while you cost the local district funding, you didn’t save anyone paying in 20,000 dollars.

(It seems to me that in my district (and state) we don’t track the funding daily throughout the year. We’ve got a couple of count days to make sure the kids actually enrolled at the schools, and we have to offer a certain number of instructional days overall to get the funding, but we don’t lose money on a daily basis if particular kids don’t show up. Concerns about canceling school (usually for weather) are limited usually to wondering how many days we can miss without making them up; there’s no discussion of lost funds that I’ve ever heard.

Daily attendance at my school is pretty high, so it may that I don’t hear about it because it’s not seen as a problem. We also don’t have a lot of schools that qualify for additional federal funding, and that might affect our seemingly more casual attitude.

In my district, the amount of money we could collect from the state would be down by two for Ragnarok’s kids, which would be significant in terms mainly of allocated teacher pay if they happened to be the particular kid who pushed the average over to earning enough to pay another teacher: the 25th if the state cap was 24 say, or if it was a year we were allocated state funds for new textbooks. In most cases, two kids being gone really wouldn’t make an appreciable difference in what was actually spent at that school that year. The teachers would be employed; the air conditioning would still be on; and extra textbooks would probably sit in the book room.

We also choose as local voters to have a higher assessed local property tax to produce additional funding for the schools. The amount collected isn’t based on enrollment in any but a purely theoretical way.

Atlanta Public Schools might serve as a good example of how declining enrollment can fail to actually save taxpayers money. All it did for APS is drive the figure that they published as the “spending per pupil” way up. What the system could compel out of local homeowners and business didn’t seem to drop at all, even if the funding from the state went down. While the parents who send their kids to private schools who see the “spending per pupil” amount may be kicking themselves, the figure actually has very little to do with what would be spent on their children if they choose to go to the public schools.

While funding approaches vary by state, state funding is usually tied to your average daily attendance rate, as Ragnarok pointed out. (This is why everyone sweats bullets when there is a flu outbreak or it starts snowing. Refuse to cancel school and lots of kids don’t show, you lose money. Cancel school too often, and you have to start making up days at district expense. Personally, I believe these decisions need to be made based on public health and safety; my administrators are sick of hearing from me on this issue.)

While the amount the district loses *typically* is not the full PPE (the state government and local property taxes provide the bulk of the annual district revenues, with the split being so variable that averages don’t mean much of anything), it can still be a pretty big chunk of cash per student. This raises another complaint from choice advocates: when a student leaves an underperforming school, s/he doesn’t take the full PPE to the new school. If that were the case, schools might suddenly become a lot more interested in meeting the needs of individual students and their parents.

When he depends on others to help pay for it, then he has to be prepared to listen the opinion of other payers about the education that the kid gets.

NDC, you are so close to taking that next libertarian step. All that’s left to do now is conclude that listening to the opinions of others with respect to your own child’s education is idiotic, which leads to a single possible outcome: no one depends on others to help pay for their child’s education. Is that a workable possibility?

Schools are paid according to the average daily attendance (ADA). That’s why they’re so keen on keeping the attendance up. So if my kids were to attend a public school, that school would get ~$20,000 per year; since they don’t, the school doesn’t get the money.

Why do you think schools close when attendance drops? Because the money supply decreases! Using your logic, a school could get rid of all its students, continue raking in the money, and do nothing for it.

N’est ce pas?

And as sick as it seems, I think there’s an element of “at least it keeps them off the streets” mentality about public school that non-parents are willing to pay for. (Or in good districts “my house is worth more because the schools are good” self-interest.) If vouchers don’t guarantee universal student placement in new schools or there’s not a direct connection between property taxes and enrollment in the local schools, there will be even less interest in non-parents paying.