<p>“BUt yes, while the city does spend more money, the surrounding districts seem able to have more to show for it.”</p>
<p>Well, if your cities are run like ours, the graft, corruption, fraud, nepotism, and general incompetance account for much of the problem.</p>
<p>Due to lawsuits NJ has a program that equalizes school spending throughout the state. I don’t know the mechanics but all the districts have fairly similar spending. That does not mean they get anywhere near equal outcomes.</p>
<p>In NJ, the courts have designated a select number of low-income school districts as Abbott districts (named after the court case which mandated them - gotta love those activist judges!!!) The affect is that these districts are funded by the state to a level of the budgets the richest districts in the state (which they collect by means of their local taxes). Of course the state gets their money from taxes paid by the moderate and high income districts.</p>
<p>In NJ’s recent financial meltdown, the Republican proposal was to reduce Abbot funding so that it was comparable to the average NJ school district rather than the richest. This seems fair to me, but the Dems decided that raising taxes made more sense - so we will just increase our lead over the rest of the nation in taxes paid. No wonder so many senior citizens are moving out of NJ.</p>
<p>FF is correct. There is no equalized school spending in NJ. Just redistribution of education funds from middle class/wealthy districts to the Abbott designated districts. The average per pupil cost in NJ is around $11,000 per year. In my town it is about $9,000. In Newark, about $16,000. The wealthiest districts have their spending capped, so no matter how worthy a program, or how willing the townspeople are to fund it, they can’t because they must not spend a penny more than the Abbotts. You wouldn’t believe the waste as Abbott districts rush to spend $$$ redecorating administrator’s offices and sending Board members on fact-finding tours of school systems in some lovely, desirable vacation areas. Abbott school suuperintendants have received limo service, too.</p>
<p>Thirty year old schools are being demolished in the ABBott districts to make way for huge, state-of the art facilities. My son attends the local public school built in 1917. The school gives new meaning to the term “multi-purpose” room when music classes are held in storage closets and janitor supply areas are partitioned into needed classroom space. Yet our tax $$$ is providing olympic sized swimming pools, science labs, technology centers, and dance studios to Abbott schools.</p>
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Yes, Cali has a strong agricultural base, but it wasn’t raised in the high density cities. They are simply consumers. When you start talking about who produces the money, they couldn’t be there without the rural ‘low density’ areas of the country to support them.</p>
<p>You might like to read the “Edible Estates” article in the NYT for an alternative to those ecological deserts called lawns.</p>
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<p>Gosh, those kids in inner-city Newark have it so good! Your kids really got the shaft being born into a suburban family instead. ;)</p>
<p>If you want a more typical American school system, you might want to consider moving here to Illinois, where school districts derive 54% of their funding from local property taxes and there are no limits on how little a poor district can spend. Here, rich suburban kids get the Olympic pools and science labs their parents earned for them, and all that richly deserved Lake Forest money isn’t thrown away on kids in East St. Louis.</p>
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<p>But that’s equally true in reverse. Farmers don’t eat the food they grow any more; they sell it to people in cities. They couldn’t operate without customers. So the fact that one group grows food while the other generates the money that buys the seed, tractors, and gas doesn’t explain why federal money should flow unevenly in one direction. This isn’t just a matter of haves giving to have-nots (as seen above, I’m FOR that); it’s also a matter of specific subsidies to rural industries, especially mining and ranching. The die was cast on that back in 1789 or so, and the rural states won. So be it – but it would help if more people acknowledged that this has a great deal to do with political power, and not just poverty, or the importance of farming relative to banking.</p>
<p>Hanna, I doubt you know much about the problems of NJ public education. If you are a “have,” feel free to turn over you last dime to the “have-nots.” I resent being taxed to death (over $10grand on a modest home) while my town struggles to maintain ancient facilities. My kids are getting the shaft, I assure you. Abbott districts are bulldozing modern schools that my town would LOVE to pick up and move to replace any of the aging buildings we make do with. </p>
<p>When the poverty-pimps in Newark travel to luxury vacation destinations or are brought to work in limos or furnish their offices with mahogany desks on my dime, I don’t feel like adding cute little winking smiley faces to my posts. And these abuses happen because activist judges, not voters, are allowing it.</p>
<p>In NJ, the courts have designated a select number of low-income school districts as Abbott districts (named after the court case which mandated them - gotta love those activist judges!!!) The affect is that these districts are funded by the state to a level of the budgets the richest districts in the state (which they collect by means of their local taxes). Of course the state gets their money from taxes paid by the moderate and high income districts.</p>
<p>Ok
so the property taxes go to a pool and then are equally dispensed rather than the money from one disrict going to that district?</p>
<p>In Wa we have equalized money coming from the state- if we lobby the legislature to give Seattle more money, then they have to give everyone more money ( ya right)
so they don’t
SO Seattle can vote for levies, and initiatives and several are actually coming up on the ballot this fall ( which I am voting against because I think they have to be slapped upside the head to be forced to get their house in order before we give them more money)to increase the amount coming into the district. ( THe city however has drug them into court because they would be using the city to levy th etaxes without the city having any say over what they are used for)
What I especially love is that whenever a quote is given on how much it will increase your taxes they use as an example a house that is assessed at $300,000.
Our 105 year old, less than 1000 sq ft huuse is assessed at $450,000 so where are they finding these “average” houses that cost $300,000?
Under Greg Nickels front porch?</p>
<p>I pay about $4500/year in taxes on my condo, and I have no children, so I guess we’re about equal on that score. I suspect that you don’t know all that much about being an inner city school child. Although you must know more about it than you let on, because you haven’t solved the state’s unfairness to your children by moving to Newark.</p>
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<p>If waste is the problem, then oversight of spending, not tax reform, is the solution. You can waste your own county’s money as easily as you can waste someone else’s (Lord knows we’re good at that here in Cook County).</p>
<p>If inequality, not waste, is the problem (since the science labs you complain about don’t sound too wasteful), I wonder if the real issue is that it’s presently unequal in someone else’s favor rather than in yours. Would you be complaining if, as in Lake Forest, your school had the science lab and Olympic pool, and the Newark schools were crumbling? That’s what we have here, and I hear zero Lake Forest parents complaining about the tax structure that leads to the desperately under-resourced Chicago public schools where I volunteer.</p>
<p>(I’m happy to say, though, that some of them are working to make up the shortfall: <a href=“http://www.jenner.com/news/news_item.asp?id=12834724[/url]”>http://www.jenner.com/news/news_item.asp?id=12834724</a>)</p>
<p>The Illinois system says that Kid A is entitled to a better public school than Kid B because Kid A’s parents own more property than Kid B’s parents. At a private school, you should get what you pay for, I’ll agree. But that’s a crummy way to apportion government services IMHO. It seems that in New Jersey, public schools are premised as a benefit provided to children at public expense rather than a product purchased by groups of parents. That’s a heck of an improvement over Illinois in my book.</p>
<p>Hanna: Before making some of these weighty pronouncements, and implying that people don’t care about the quality of education for others, perhaps you should give yourself a little time, have your own family, gain a bit of experience. I used to view the world much as you do, trust me, but things can change when you’re out there fighting for what you believe is best for your own children.</p>
<p>While I do not believe that age turns one into a conservative, hereshoping is definitely right that one views issues like education wholly differently when one is thinking about ones own progeny. </p>
<p>I must confess that I have lost my PC liberal attitude about simply continuing to throw money at public education, now that I see that what I am funding, through my exhorbitant, salary size property tax bill, is not directly impacting my own child positively at all (even if I am funding programs and services that positively impact other people’s children).</p>
<p>And we don’t have Abbott districts, just kids with lots of disparate needs.</p>
<p>emerald: The $$ is not equally dispensed. In NJ, most education spending is derived from property taxes. Plus, we have the problem of judges mandating the Abbott funding. Taxpayers & legislators aren’t in control here.</p>
<p>Hanna: NJ kids are not benefiting equally. Yes, the waste, graft, & fraud suck resources away from needed educational resources. But in NJ, rather than prosecute the criminals, judges just throw them more money as advocacy groups petition for blood from a stone. I only know of Cook County by its corrupt reputation, so I have no idea if your apportionment is worse or better than that of NJ, particularly Essex County. </p>
<p>I know nothing about being an inner city kid first hand. Several have attempted to mug me, however. Does that count as insider knowledge?
I’ve taken care of them in my work as a nurse. I’ve seen a few heart-breaking tragedies as the kids died of AIDS or struggled with the accute pain of sickle cell. Does that count as insider knowledge? I’ve worked in Newark & attended school at NJIT, Rutgers, and UMDNJ. It’s a dangerous, depressing place to which I have no desire to move & would not want to raise my kids. I do say “There but for the Grace of God go I” when I see the circumstances many of these kids must overcome. But that doesn’t mean my kids aren’t getting the shaft in the educational funding nightmare that is NJ.</p>
<p>I am a “liberal”
at least I have the tshirt and I see that our district is primarily in the business of employing adults, not educating children.
We give principals who cant lead, district level jobs, we give others a gold parachute to get rid of them and we “eat” cost overuns by builders even though neighborhing cities emplying the same builders hold them to their final bids
Nope I don’t think continually raising taxes does a frgging thing</p>
<p>“I see that our district is primarily in the business of employing adults, not educating children.” BINGO! A coast to coast problem, it seems.</p>
<p>I do have my d in a Catholic, all-girl h.s. that is excellent. (And expensive.) I’m still clinging to the notion that a public elementary school where my son meets his neighbors and learns community pride is worth the trade off in quality. I don’t know if he’ll make it to middle school at this rate.</p>
<p>“Nope I don’t think continually raising taxes does a frgging thing” The poverty-pimps seem to like it, though.</p>
<p>Right so, I’m not a parent so technically I guess I don’t “belong” here, I don’t own a house, and I don’t know much about paying property taxes but I do happen to know a whole lot about attending school for 12 years in an Abbot district. I’ve heard of the term in passing before but I didn’t really know much about it or that my town and the other 2 major towns in my county were part of it until now. </p>
<p>If we were supposed to be getting anywhere near the funding that north Jersey schools get, it must have gotten lost somewhere during its trip down the state. I spent my high school walking into trashcans in the middle of hallways that were put there to catch the rainwater from the leaking roofs and wearing two sweaters because they never managed to turn the heat up high enough. I’ve attended classes in closets and in trailers in the parking lot. The last “new” school we got was an office building that was converted to a middle school a few years ago. They never had enough money to build a gym or an auditorium or anything like that until just recently - I hear they held gym class in the winters by making the kids run up and down the long hallways. Our swim team takes a nice 45 minute bus ride to practice because none of the schools in the county have a swimming pool. I don’t even want to know what any of these places would look like if they were funded solely on property taxes. I think the idea that we’re somehow more “advantaged” than the rich north Jersey suburbs is pretty much laughable.</p>
<p>BlahdeBlah - don’t confuse us with reality. Whiny ideology is so much more satisfying to emit.</p>
<p>BlahdeBlah, be careful, you don’t agree with FF, who seems to know all, except the reallity of what happens, not the pretty stuff on paper…and ain’t we bad little liberals for wanting our kids to have equal educations? </p>
<p>I thought having a well educated population was what made our nation great…opps…</p>
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You are just exposing how little you know. My fiance teaches in an Abbott school district so I hear in significant detail how money is being spent. For example, her classroom was recently equipped with a whole bank of computers, scanners and television monitors networked together and linked with sophisticated software to allow the teacher to incorporate multimedia into the classroom learning environment. The trouble is, after buying and installing all of the equipment, they never got all of the bugs out of it and never gave her any training on how to use it. So, in effect, we have a taxpayer funded bunch of electronics costing tens of thousands of dollars (for 16 students) sitting idle. No one said that the Abbott money was being spent wisely - just that it is being spent.</p>
<p>Also the teacher/student ratio is something that a suburban school could only dream about. As I said, her class had only 16 students. The other three fifth grade classes also had 12-16 students in them, but each of them had two teachers assigned to them. While her district hasn’t spent money on new schools yet (just fixing up the existing ones) - the new middle school is about to be started. A neighboring Abbott district is just completing their new HUGE high school (sized to support twice the number of students - even though the population of the town is decreasing). It is complete with a professional-grade television studio. All new Abbott district schools that are built are 100% funded with state money - so the local community doesn’t contribute any of its own property tax money.</p>
<p>This is so worth repeating: “When the poverty-pimps in Newark travel to luxury vacation destinations or are brought to work in limos or furnish their offices with mahogany desks on my dime, I don’t feel like adding cute little winking smiley faces to my posts. And these abuses happen because activist judges, not voters, are allowing it.”</p>
<p>I live in NYC and we see so much of the same nonsense.</p>
<p>For the record, I live about 1/2 mile in each direction from two sets of projects and my middle daughter will be starting at an inner city high school this fall – the first of my kids to leave private school – so I do know whereof I speak.</p>
<p>Will wonders never cease! I completely agree with FF, and this indicates that partisanship does not hold firm boundaries on all issues.</p>