Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, September 21, 1995 TAG: 9509210040
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RAY L. GARLAND
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Gov. George Allen is refusing to yield the battleground on education, despite warnings from the GOP's own pollster that the issue works better for Democrats. But how can you ignore the biggest issue in state government? Spending on education consumes more than half of all taxes raised at the state and local level.
On one side you have the Virginia Education Association and its allies saying public education hasn't failed, it has simply never been adequately funded. On the other side are conservatives saying it doesn't make sense to pay the same people more money to do the same old thing: Let's experiment with charter schools or even vouchers good at private schools to encourage more competition and choice. In fact, using official statistics and a little imagination, you can prove either case.
For the 1993-94 school year - the last for which complete data is available - Virginia's 133 school divisions enrolled just over a million pupils and spent $6.5 billion, including debt service, or almost $6,400 per student. But that was only the average. Arlington County spent $11,700 on each of its students, while Lee County got by with almost exactly half as much. Among cities, the always frugal Virginia Beach spent less than $5,500 per student, while traditionally prodigal Richmond was spending half again as much.
You can add at least 10 percent for the current school year. That would bring the average cost per student to more than $7,000, or almost $40 for each of the 180 days in the regular school calendar.
It's only when you express public-school spending this way that you cause some people to scratch their heads and ask, "Gee, that seems a lot. Where's the beef?" But this isn't something your average politician can say.
At the end of the 1993-94 school year, the schools employed 73,583 instructional personnel, or one for every 14 students. But they also employed 49,424 other workers, including 10,953 teacher aides. These 123,000 school employees and their families represent a powerful political constituency.
While less than a third of the households have a child in the public schools, they represent an even more powerful constituency, approaching a million voters. We can safely assume that most want the best for their kids and don't object to other people paying for it. And if polls be gospel, most are satisfied with the job the schools are doing. Given a choice between good grades signifying no real achievement and rigorous academic standards that might cause their darlings to sweat, I believe most parents would opt for the first.
It's also a fact that many communities spend very little on their schools in local taxes. For 1993-94, Lee County spent only $757 per student from local funds and received $4,464 from state and federal sources. By comparison, Alexandria raised $7,000 per student in local taxes and received only $1,737 from outside.
That's one reason educators didn't cheer when Allen proposed sending all lottery profits back to the localities, to be spent as they saw fit. They feared two things: Future state grants for education might be trimmed, and local officials might not spend the lottery money on education. They might even use it to cut local property taxes.
But both parties are tinkering at the margin. No matter how you slice the lottery money, it amounts to less than 2 percent of what we're spending on public schools. And even if the governor's idea on charter schools gets a fair chance, it will be years before they enroll more than a fraction of the students.
And Democrats, for all their posturing, plainly lack the guts to raise state taxes enough to give the schools substantially more money, or even to grant localities additional revenue sources to tap.
Business leaders just told the Southern governors meeting in Biloxi that inefficient schools are hurting the region and stand as a major impediment to future growth.
It's easy to blame teachers for what we think is wrong, though I think that blame would be largely misplaced. It is the smug hostility of both students and parents to anything that smacks of genuine learning that represents the nut teachers can't crack. There are exceptions, of course, but family attitudes seem to be more important than having more professional staff and nice buildings. We see this in state testing, where some of the rural counties and small cities that don't spend a lot on their schools obtain outstanding results. That's family values talking, and you can't buy it.
With the utilities being deregulated, the public schools are one of the last monopolies in America. You don't have to believe they're doing a terrible job to believe we'll be better off when that monopoly is broken. But I don't see charter schools offering much hope. For one thing, the high cost of starting a school from scratch will dictate that most of those seeking a charter must persuade an existing public school to convert. In most places, that will mean a long and nasty fight.
For 25 years we've accepted the idea of tuition grants or vouchers for Virginia students attending private colleges in this state, and no one has made a fuss over the fact that a number of these colleges are church-related. Most of us believe it's a good buy for taxpayers - or no more than fair - to pay a portion of the tuition from public funds. If only we could apply this logic to secondary schools we might get somewhere. When free to choose, instead of having a choice imposed on them, students and parents may take more interest. As "paying" customers, they may also demand more, and attach more value to what they get.
Ray L. Garland is a Roanoke Times columnist.
Keywords:
POLITICS
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