Money

I may get some grief about the following post, but I hope you hear me out.
I have been seeing many angry blog posts about our education system and how we should privatize all schools. I know that many people are saying that they would rather have their students home schooled or in private schools. The problem with private schools is that they cost a lot of money. The point of our public schools is to educate everyone, regardless, for free. However, that doesn't seem to be working. The problem with homeschooling is that the student does not benefit from social interactions and there could be major discrepancies between what is taught at home and what skills are necessary at the college level. Public schools need to get more money without raising the cost of an education so high that the less fortunate cannot attend.

You may be wondering how we would pay for this plan of mine. The cost of running a more efficient, self-aware, accountable school district shouldn't be too much. The only cost that I can imagine would be for more administrators. I will address those administrator jobs in another post. In this post, I would like to focus on how we would pay for those few extra positions in order to better our schools, without the assistance of the government. I would imagine that if the government tried to help, we would be looking at raising taxes to pay for our shortcomings. Instead of raising taxes, I propose a minimal registration fee for all students in the public schools. If the districts could charge a small non-refundable fee per student, per year, that money would help tremendously. Of course, there would have to be some stipulations about how much and how high it could legally go. I don’t really recommend it be more than forty dollars, but I believe it would depend on the district’s size. In Murrieta, California, there are about 8500 students in the high school district alone. Imagine if they each had to pay a mere ten dollars per year to register for school. That would earn the district 85,000 dollars each year. That money would have to be designated for the new administrator positions for this to work. Perhaps for smaller districts, the fee may be more, however, the fewer teachers, the fewer additional administrators needed.

Okay, why would we want to ask more of the general population to help fund our schools? Because they place their kids in these schools and if they knew that the money would help create better teachers for their students, then I believe they would have no problem complying. Maybe I am wrong, but I do have a feeling that something like a registration fee of ten to twenty bucks would go over much better with the public than another hike in taxes. Can’t the districts try to help themselves? I don’t know.
Parents, does this sound like something you could get behind? I would love to hear what you think about this.