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In my blag post titled, "The Economic Recovery Plan," I talked briefly about property tax and education reform and promised that there would be a post dedicated to this topic in the near future. Well today's you're lucky day folks! I realize that my opinions on education may upset educators and progressive liberals of all sorts. However, I believe that, in order to right the US economy, we need to have some changes to our primary and secondary education system.

First of all, allow me to say that I do not advocate much in the way of cuts to the education system across the country. However, I do believe that there are some decisive changes that need to be made in order to make the system more efficient and get more value for the tax dollars spent.

Part of the cause of the housing crisis in the United States is that school districts funding is based largely on the value of the homes in the area. Higher home values means higher property taxes, which means more funding for local schools. Thus, educators and everyone close to the education system have been trying to push property values up. This, combined with I-bankers' casino-like gambling in the housing market, lead to a huge housing boom. Sadly, this sort of boom is always followed by a bust, which meant a sudden and dramatic drop in housing values and the associated property tax revenue.

Coming up with a solution to the property tax problem alone is a conundrum. Is there really any other parameter under which property taxes can be calculated and collected, or would property taxes have to be abandoned and their revenue replaced by hikes in other taxes? The best alternate system that I can think of is basing property taxes on the number of people inhabiting each acre of land with respect to the population density of the surrounding area with separate rates for areas deemed rural, suburban, and urban. However, in the end, I'm not sure that this would be better than just throwing out property taxes and raising income and sales taxes to compensate. I just couldn't tell you for sure.

Regardless of what method of taxation was used, the proportion of wealth taken in by the states cannot continue to increase with respect to income. For years, states have taken in billions more dollars to try to help fund public eduction while the nation's infrastructure rots to nothingness (said the civil engineer). I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it doesn't matter how well kids know their multiplication tables when they're dying of Giardia or Cholera because the state chose more money for education over a drinking water treatment plant. While it's working out alright for now, the track we're on is just not sustainable.

So, without further ado, allow me to unveil my ideas for trimming the fat off education so that (maybe) we could have drinking water, sanitary sewer, and transportation systems that don't suck:

1. Eliminate Bilingual Education Programs. Since I would have already deported the illegal immigrants, this wouldn't be as big of an issue as it might seem. Any child holding citizenship status and not speaking fluent English would be put into a rigorous English immersion program.
2. Reduce the power of teachers' unions and certification boards. The goal of this change would not be to reduce the pay of teachers, who already take in the shorts monetarily. The goal would be to take down the institutions that keep bad teachers in the classroom. In order to create better value for taxpayers, we need to have the most capable teachers, and not just the oldest and most social powerful, in the classroom. Unions and cert. boards are made up, largely, of current teachers, who have their own interests in mind. A set of bad teachers can stay right where they are if they're also on the cert. board by keeping better teachers from becoming certified.
   
3. Change the cert. requirements for teachers. To the chagrin of elementary education majors across the nation, I would remove the requirement of having a bachelor's degree in order to teach elementary and middle school. Before you tell me that that would only reduce the quality of teachers, let me present to you the brilliant, but impossible alternative. I've met a few people, among whom there were plenty of education majors, who graduated from reasonably good colleges still being dumber than a bag of hammers and not knowing the functional differences between there, their, and they're, nor being able to find the People's Republic of China on a map. What the American education system really needs is consistent testing of intelligence and communication skills for teachers. Now, we go on a detour as to why this little slice of reason will never happen. In the case of Griggs v. Duke Power Co., a group of black workers sued the power company for which they worked, for using intelligence tests to discriminate against minority workers. The supreme court ruled that, under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, companies could not institute any selection criteria, including intelligence testing, that would cause minorities to be less likely to win jobs. (If you don't find this a little ridiculous, you're part of the "Don't confuse me with the facts," problem we have in this country.) This ruling made it functionally illegal for any organization to use intelligence testing as a selection criteria for employment, including certification of teachers. Now just to be clear, I'm not trying to recruit the best and brightest to be teachers. This would be absurd, based on the current salaries of teachers. After all, those who can't do teach. I'm just trying to make sure that we don't keep morons as teachers just because they were the best we had 12 years ago.
4. Remove competitive athletics from government budgets. I like sports as much as the next guy, but much like the Bowl Championship Series of Division I-A football, competitive sports are a large burden on our government-funded education system. All funding for competitive athletics would have to come from approved boosters. Left to its own devices, this system would unduly favor the children of rich parents, who are already over-privileged as it is. However, with this reform, I would also require that all booster contributions be pooled by the state and redistributed based on enrollment. This way, East High School (Denver) would get a similar athletic budget to Cherry Creek High and all other schools of similar size. If a rich family is going to buy new equipment for their son's football team, they're going to also have to buy new equipment for every other school in the state. Also, any program found not properly reporting its booster contributions to the state would have those contributions seized and would not be allowed to play for one full athletic season.
   
5. Open up a can of whoop-@$$ on textbook publishers. Any undergraduate can tell you, "The price of textbooks is too D@mn high!" This would take the form of not only taking measures to reduce prices outright, but also to prevent publishers from coming out with frivolous new editions. Restrictions would be placed on how often publishers could come out with new books, and if there wasn't enough new, groundbreaking material in a new edition, publishers would be required to continue printing the old edition and selling it at the same price.
6. Open up a slightly less intense can of whoop-@$$ on technology companies. In exchange for not having their taxes raised, makers of computers and software would have to supply a certain number of desktops, printers, tablets, etc. to states for use in public schools. Any proceeds collected from the potential tax hike on tech companies would be redistributed to the states for the purpose of funding education.
   
7. Construct schools with a contractual design life. Many school districts are not held accountable for how they use their school buildings and when they replace them. Districts would have to commit to how long they would use a school building. The longer the design life of the building, the more money the district would get from the state in order to build it. The only way that a district could sell a school building short of its legal design life is if the costs of repairing the building, in absolute terms, would be greater than the cost of a new building.

The purpose of these changes would not be to restrict or cut the public education system. My main purpose would be to stabilize the costs to taxpayers in order to help create an environment conducive to economic growth. With the increased tax revenue that would (hopefully) come from economic growth, money could be allocated to other projects, like the infrastructure that's vital to anything remotely resembling our quality of life in the United States. In the long term, I would hope that both the funding for education and other government-funded programs could continue so that we, in the United States, can continue to have the quality of life we enjoy.

Unfortunately, the reforms I list in this post are almost as unrealistic as the one that I suggested in the last post, most of them for similar reasons. I can only hope that the feds and states of United States of America can make some priorities that actually contribute to the welfare of its citizens, especially the middle class. Though, I'm pretty sure I'm going to start learning Chinese, just in case.