In response to the opinion offered in The Mt. Laurel Sun’s April 17–23 edition. I strongly disagree with portions of the article and certainly found the logic faulty at best. Let me say I moved to Mt. Laurel from Dallas some 30 years ago because it had good schools based on the information available. My children benefitted from that education and all went on to finish and graduate from college. That education was certainly paid for in full by me with some loans and grants from the federal government. Here are my basic objections to the opinion piece:
Boards of education do submit budgets, but they are driven solely by spending. They do not start with a baseline of zero. So each year, the question is how much more can you spend? The first question should be, of what monies we had last year, how much should be eliminated? Based on this faulty built-in logic, at the end of the year, it makes sense for those in this type of system to invent things on which to spend the money so not to reduce next year’s take.
The built in assumption is that it should cost more each year. That’s simply wrong. In every private sector business in the past 5 years, everyone has had to find ways to do the same job with less resources. How come schools don’t ever have to do that?
School taxes have been raised in my time in Mt. Laurel over 400 percent. I can find nothing else in my life that comes close.
Families do move out of New Jersey, as I most certainly will after their kids have gone through school. However it is not to game the system as implied in the article. It’s the fact, that when you have a fixed budget in the future, you need to be very careful about accepting expenses that are escalating without any way to check their spending. The real estate tax scares older people, as it should.
The state measures their school performance against other schools with testing scores. I think this could be a false premise to begin with at best. If all the schools are bad, you just could be the best of the worst. When our education is compared to other countries, we are falling like a rock internationally.
The cost of education is often discussed as a cost per pupil, but it is interesting that no other school cost is compared in a similar fashion. How about comparing the number of school districts, the number of superintendents, or the cost of administrations. When you get into those numbers, you start to see where the money is wasted and how the union has a death grip on our legislature and real estate taxes.
The assumption is that if you want good schools, it simply cost more, which has been proven to be wrong in every part of our country. It is embarrassingly simplistic, ignores the success of charter schools, and ignores the failure of monies spent in excess in other parts of our state.
The article goes on to say that of course the schools could do a better job of spending, and taxpayers are screaming out, “what incentive do they have to save a dime?” The system is broken. The guys that benefit from the faulty design are not going to fix it because they are not going to take a pay cut.
I’ve never thought real estate taxes are the right way to fund schools. It obviously spreads those cost over a few who own property while all benefit from the education. I have two daughters who are now teachers, and I come from a family of teachers. The problems are complicated, but can’t be solved if we continue to lie to ourselves about the real issues that drive the cost of education for our children beyond our ability to pay for it.
Humbly submitted,
James A. Misselwitz
