Mankato Mike wrote:
Here’s a new funding formula idea. Do away with school districts. Do away with special education. Do away with gifted education. Do away with bus transportation. Do away with property taxes financing education. Have the state send each parent a check for $8000 per child and have each parent CHOOSE the school that makes sense to them. If a school for the gifted and talented costs $10,000 than the parent picks up the other $2,000. If a school for a child with autism costs $30,000 then the parents pick up the remaining $22,000. Every child is treated exactly the same by the state. No favoritism. This should lead to more opportunities for everyone and maybe even more efficiency. A parent would be able to choose to pay more to send their child to schools with lower teacher/child ratios, a school of language immersion, etc. This would also more than likely make teaching jobs more competitive. We could allow our new system to use non-union teachers if desired and allow schools to hire/fire and discipline their employees like the private sector.
Minnesota also0 needs to opt out of the No child Left behind B.S., that just leaves ALL the children behind the likes of China, Japan, India, and European students.
Mankato Mike: If parents and families get no assistance, low income kids who are outside of the norm stand little chance of changing their situation -- Whether special education or gifted program, it's a matter of individual education, which is always going to cost more. Families with kids with disabilities, already strapped for cash because most of them don't have the luxury of two incomes if they are caring for a kid with a disability, may not have the option of sending them to school at all.
So, you end up with a class of people who stand little chance of bettering themselves, and another group who have little chance of developing to be able to care for themselves without intervention. Both become dependent on social services for the rest of their lives.
You might have fixed the school spending issues, but you've created a whole new set of problems that extend long beyond 12 years.
Judge it!
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