School Spending Caps and Other Dumb Ideas

I was quite distressed that our State Senate approved the governor’s foolish idea of putting price caps on schooling. Sure everyone wants lower taxes, just like we want to pay less for gas. If price caps on education, why not price caps on gasoline? Let’s pass a law that says gas in Vermont will cost no more than $2.37 a gallon.

You don’t need a degree in economics to imagine the outcry. “We can’t afford to sell gas at those prices. Our prices are set by the marketplace!” This is how the “marketplace” works. They take how much it costs them to make, and add all the profit they think they can. The cost of education is set the same way, except that there nobody gets profits. Another difference is that anybody can go to board meetings, talk to board members, and vote up or down school budgets. Try doing that for gasoline.
Yet for some reason, some people want the state government to tie our hands, and say we can’t spend what we want on our kids. The Republican Party recently sued our state, saying it was a violation of their civil rights to be barred from setting spending limits on elections. Now the same party wants to set spending limits on education, so that when the price of gasoline goes up and the price of healthcare goes up, we have no choice but to fire teachers.

It’s no mystery what is driving up education spending. Fuel costs, healthcare costs, testing costs, special education costs. No Child Left Behind costs schools more to do than they are paid to do it, even before the feds start punishing schools for having trouble. When the feds required schools to educate disabled children in 1975, they promised to pay for it, and have yet to pony up one quarter of the promised cash.

The same people who are pushing spending caps are the people who profit from oil stocks, pharmaceutical stocks, and the federal tax cuts that have robbed money from state education funds. Many of them also have their kids in private schools.