I see that it's time for Dave-the-corporate-shill to come in with some ever so helpful misleading figures as part of his social media outreach efforts. Don't worry folks, he's only paid indirectly from the Kochs, and all this information (and the context he won't give you) come from the government he's here to dismantle.

Base state aid was only cut in a two year change of $232, and schools were given the "option" of gutting their rainy day funds or underfunding the system, so it's all ok folks, nothing to protest here. Carry on.

There's nothing misleading whatsoever about the official numbers I posted. They are simply facts that schools and others choose to ignore.

But speaking of misleading, districts would not have to gut their rainy day funds...most would simply be using a small portion of their prior year surplus. Total carryover surplus going into the year was $775 million...if they used the full $154 million authorized...they would still have $621 million remaining. One does not need to be proficient in math to understand that most districts would still have considerable surplus remaining.

The last comment in the above post? That you're either deliberately obtuse or just a lousy researcher? Ah, Dave. You've yet to clear that one up, but we still do have the record of what you said.

Yes, it's quite clear who has the job of being misleading here, Dave.

The facts are that students are losing funding. The facts are that we've lost federal matching grants, though I'm unclear as to whether or not we've lost more grants this year due to maintenance of effort. Funds that once lost, are lost forever. The state liability to provide those services does not go away, however, so we're stuck with more lawsuits and expensive SpED funding or less funding per typically developing pupil. That would be a helpful thing to clarify, but I doubt you will. It doesn't fit your narrative.

The facts are that they're having to spend reserves to maintain lost per pupil funding. Those reserves are finite and that the legislature has indicated that they'd like to further lower taxes, meaning that the depletion of those reserves is nearly a foregone conclusion without a revenue increase, which is unlikely to ever happen while Brownie holds court. One refers to this sort of thing as a "gutting." "Remove or extract the most important parts of (something) in a damaging or destructive manner"

Oh, we could go round and round on this one, notright. Students are losing funding. Less per pupil aid means less per pupil aid, whether that money goes to paying for extra teachers or raises for retaining experienced teachers. Even Dave knows it. He's just trying to nitpick and spin.

I agree that I'd like to see the education system work better, but starving the funds is not the way to accomplish it.

The argument usually goes thusly:

Private enterprise is magical and the power of competition will make schools perform better.

Nice sounding theory with many flaws.

In systems with lottery-style charters (so we eliminate self-selection bias) students don't do any better in private charter schools than they do in public schools when you look at socioeconomic status. In a broad public vs private comparison, the results were the same. (with the exception of small-order run parochial schools, and that may just be because it's a self-selected group)

We might want to move to more of a Finnish system, though. You know, well compensated, highly qualified teachers who are also heavily unionized. We'd have to up both the pay and the degree qualifications for our teachers to do it.

That's an overly simplistic answer, since Finland also has much flatter socioeconomic status, and the majority of our school performance issues are tied to our inability to educate poor people. However, starving the education system only makes that problem worse.

It's really a pity we can't have an honest discussion of our education system, because there are plenty of us parents who believe it's a system worth saving.