Every tax is a pay cut.  Every tax cut is a pay raise.
Citizens for Limited Taxation

Teachers and Runaway School Costs
A high level of investment in education would be worth the expenditure if the education outcomes comparably increased as well. It seems however that we have experienced a collapse in productivity in the performance of additional education tax dollars. We are now getting a negative rate of return on our investments in education.

What do we get for our profligate school spending?

We have fast rising teacher salaries, which in itself is not a bad thing if we actually paid teachers according to competency, performance or demand.  Unfortunately, union negotiated salary schedules shortchange high performing teachers at the expense of mediocre and incompetent teachers.  But even more troubling is that our children are subjected to union-protected inept instruction.

The blame for skyrocketing school costs lies squarely on the Board of Selectman who have been willing to "tax out" homeowners rather than curb spending or say no to budget-busting union demands.

Our current crop of tax and spend liberal selectman (the Gang of Four (Ross, Kahn, Hopkins and Sisitskty) as I call them) will approve any and all financial requests from the School Committee, which in turn comes from the teachers unions.  They seem to do this without regard to the children of Framingham. 

1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003
The only things we are actually getting from this are:
  • higher property taxes
  • higher teacher salaries, and
  • declining SAT scores
Shown below are assorted graphs to show this.

If towns like Framingham demonstrably can't run good schools, they should be allowed to find non-public means of fulfilling the education mandate.
A smaller class size is not that important.  I'd rather have 30 students in front of a good teacher, than 15 students in front of a mediocre teacher.  If I do have a good teacher, (s)he should have enough support staff to help out.

Send comments to: hjw2001@rcn.com