California School Spending Opinion

If you live in California, you have no doubt heard the advertising for Proposition 1a-f. You have also heard the large amount of advertising regarding school budgets, layoffs, and the dire circumstances our kids will be in if new taxes are not passed.

All the advertising, all the protests, and all the speeches by unions and democrats, have a common theme. More money is required or teachers will lose their jobs. Why do very few question this? If you do question this, how come you are instantly tarnished?

If California thinks that its most important jobs are teachers, then how come the leaders threaten to go there first to fix budget shortfalls? If you are running a company and have to cut costs, do you layoff your most important staff first? Off course not. The leaders and organizations who threaten our teachers should be the ones questioned. If they care, like they claim, they would find other methods besides raising the burden on California by waiving teacher layoffs at us.

The leaders are simply using scare tactics to push through agendas without accountability. This is why government policy should never be created from emotions. It is easy to say you support schools and pass every measure, tax the smokers, tax the rich, tax any other group not considered socially acceptable, and feel like you have done a good thing. Problem is, the parties responsible for running these programs have no accountability. If they mess up, if they produce poor results, if they run bad programs, the answer is simple, ask for more money. This is destructive to our economy, it is destructive to our society, and don’t think for a minute the schools students don’t see the flaws. We need accountability. We can have superior schools, improve drop out rates, and have programs that result in highly educated children with out massive budget increases every year. The goal of our leaders should be improving processes and education, not how to best position our kids to pass taxes and budget increases. The unions should stop worrying how to get more money and use their resources to help improve our teachers and run schools more efficiently. They should be protesting poorly run programs and not preserving every job no matter how poorly it is done or how irrelevant it is.

If accountability is established where bad leaders, bad teachers, and bad programs are weeded out. Efficiency will return, budgets will be reduced, and at that point higher pay and better benefits can be given because California will see a noticeable difference. As it stands today, the only thing California sees is more and more requests for money without any noticeable improvements. It is not a surprise California residents are starting to say enough is enough.