On Ohio's "immoral" school funding [See School levies fail once again here] Why is funding schools in part on property taxes "immoral" as you stated in Cool Cleveland on February 16th? One belief most citizens have (and a mantra of both Democratic and Republican politics) is the concept that local control and local decision making is best and a preferred form of government. So, if the citizens of, say, Solon want to tax themselves to improve their schools, why shouldn�t they? Conversely, if the citizens of Cleveland Heights don�t want to tax themselves more, that is their right too. Why would you deny them the right to say yes or no to additional taxes and take away the right of local school districts to tax themselves? Did you ever think that the problem with our school system doesn�t primarily have to do with money? The single most important factor that determines the success of a student in school is having a supportive, healthy family environment where education is valued and encouraged. The involvement of parents makes all the difference in the world. Other important factors include peer pressure to succeed and compete academically and the quality of the teachers that they have. Right now, for as much good as the Cleveland Teachers Union does to protect the rights of senior level teachers, they do a dis-service by insisting on automatic step pay increases based on seniority, insist on a benefits package more generous than any comparable package I have seen in the private sector, a lack of a relationship between pay and performance, an inability on the part of the administration to hire teachers whose skills and energy are the most appropriate for the needs of students. As a result, you have cutbacks of new teachers as opposed to those that are the most inefficient; you have ever expanding class sizes that increasingly burden those teachers who are left; you have classrooms that don�t have other essentials, like new textbooks, because much of the money is going to pay tenured teachers with ten years experience $100,000 or more a year (including benefits) for 3/4th of a year of work. Yes, hard work for sure, but hey, it is still nine months of work for what most of us would consider a very generous salary with great benefits and job security. I asked a public school teacher about this recently. She said that school teachers, with comparable education to lawyers and doctors don�t get paid nearly as much. Hey, if that is what it is going to take for an experienced teacher to make to be satisfied that she or he is getting fairly compensated, they need to consider another profession. Right now, the Cleveland public schools are spending about $7,000 per year per student. That�s almost as much as a college tuition to Cleveland State. It is twice as much as the average parochial school tuition. It is more than most countries in Western Europe spend per student for primarily public school education. I am not suggesting that more money couldn�t be needed and that there should be more diversity in how we tax and raise funds for schools, but that�s not the answer. Reform of how and how much teachers and administrators who bargain collectively in public schools needs to happen at the same time.
from Cool Cleveland reader David Levey jdl@copper.net

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