A report from the Reason Foundation says,
in four years the combination of pension costs, health and welfare costs, and special education costs are projected to take up 57.5 percent of unrestricted general fund revenue (LAUSD’s main operational funding) before the district spends a single dollar to run a regular school program.
. . .this structural deficit forged from hiring surges, burgeoning and unaddressed pension and benefit obligations, unaddressed low attendance, overextended facilities, and antiquated management and financial structures— all during a precipitous fall in enrollment.
My guess is that the financial condition of the Montgomery County, Maryland school system is similarly affected by pension costs.
Hedging starts.
Landlords know the bill is due, they see and price increased risk early. Rents rise, fewer families more skid row.
Just another issue that’s become politicized. My friends on the Right all want to cut state worker pensions, etc. under the guise of “fiscal sanity.” Yet they remain 100% committed to delivering all promised veteran’s benefits.
By expenditure, Veteran’s benefits are mostly health care (VA for service-connected, or Tricare), disability, or retirement pensions.
I’m guessing you’re not talking about the service-connected health care and disability stuff. And service pensions are paid out of the Military Retirement Trust Fund which is about as present-budget funded as you get in government, i.e., imposing the smallest burden on future taxpayers for current-day decisions.
Bottom line: bad example.
OTOH, pretty much everything else military is an excellent example. Especially the F-35 plane.
The socialism is so precious it must be reserved for veterans and elected officials!!!
Here, in microcosm, is an clear demonstrative case where the internal and external relationships of those operating the “system” have “institutionalized” it by directing the objectives of its activities away from those objectives which generated the establishment of the “system” as an “instrumentality” for particular purpose – and into actions (policies) to serve principally objectives of those participating (internally and externally) in the relationships within the operations.
[See, Carroll Quigley “The Evolution of Civilizations” (Liberty Fund, 1979) pp. 101 & 102]
A lot of jurisdictions are experiencing “service-delivery insolvency” (or service-level insolvency, or simply “services insolvency”). Governing magazine writes on the topic quite a bit.
“Service delivery insolvency” is now the modal legal term, differentiated from “budget / balance-sheet insolvency” and “cash insolvency”, stemming mostly from the court’s adoption of certain language in the holding of the Chapter 9 Municipal bankruptcy of the city of Stockton, California (Case 12-32118, 2013). The Bankruptcy code only says “insolvent” (11 USC 109(c)(3)), and the question is what does that mean. In the wake of the financial crisis, Stockton’s consultants had reported in February 2012 that the city was in that state and unable to “… pay for all the costs of providing services at the level and quality required for the health, safety, and welfare of the community …” The court included service-delivery in its analysis of insolvency, even though it’s a bit of a stretch from the “unable to pay its debts” standard of 11 USC 101(32)(C) that previous courst often rejected.
But the point is, even as taxes go up, services quantity and quality can decline, because the money’s already been spent. That’s the answer to the question of how we are less able to afford quality government services today than we were fifty years ago, when we were a much poorer country. But richer in the sense of not carrying the burden of being screwed over by previous generations via their politicians.
The discretionary spending like summer jobs for young adults, or conservation corp stuff. Those ‘quickies’ are why local governments are effective, they have that discretionary surplus. Local governments operating on the margin are where the multipliers are highest. Residents flee when guv is ineffective.
“Residnets flee when guv is ineffective.”
That’s the thing, no they don’t, not anymore. They only flee if they can, and now, they can’t. They are a captive audience. Local governments become as bad as they can afford to get away with, and for winner cities, that is really, really bad.
But a large percentage of people who in the net contribute to the city’s budget and the local economy can leave. The people who can’t leave are mostly those who are net consumers of the city’s budget and of the economy in general. Which of course makes the city even worse off.
Leave where? Commute in for an hour each way to their city job. That is a big sacrifice.
The suburbs and exurbs are growing faster than than inner cities. By far the most job growth is in the suburbs, and by far the most common commute is suburb-to-suburb, not suburb-to-city.
Turns out Millennials, like X’rs and Boomers before them, move from the city to the suburbs after they have kids, giving lie to the notion that they prefer high-density, stack and pack city living to a house with a yard in the suburbs with good schools.
Obviously the primary purpose of public schools and the primary goal of public school management is to maintain a reservoir of reliable democrat votes in each jurisdiction. Similarly higher education has become a jobs program for people with lotts of education credentials. Since student-centered education reform is impossible in the current real estate and political environments, other tacks will be necessary for socially useful reforms. For example, a separate tax rate of say 40 percent on income from employment by tax-exempt entities such as federal, state, local, and nonprofit organizations would create a more level playing field for consumer welfare maximizing alternative tax-paying education delivery systems.
It is doubtful. given the external (political & fiscal symbiosis) and internal (relative economic and social status) natures of the relationships within the “education systems” throughout the U S, that those systems can be effectively restructured or reformed -IF – the objective is provide a facility (“instrumentality’) for subjective learning, rather than an organization (“system”) for collective, objective teaching.
The searches for departures or “escapes” from the systems have begun with, inter alia, tentative movements to “Charter” Schools (primary & secondary) most of which are still encumbered with the curricula/schedule of the respective educational systems (mainly due to fiscal issues).
What **may** be coming are facilities where the predominant relationships are between the learner (student) and the “mentors” which change at the several levels – in terms of the needs and capacities of the learners, not the “productive results” of the system. As mentioned earlier, the fore-runner of those facilities may be seen the experiences in particular California public schools using methods developed (and developing) at The Kahn Academy.
Disclosure: I have no association with Kahn Academy, other than as a small contributor and grateful user.
Great ideas here. The idea that parents can select the proper mentor for the child. The mentor works under the assumption that parents are participants. The parent no longer have to work indirectly through the PTA to participate their child’s education, they have direct access to the mentor.
I suspect that mentors + economies of scale + legible signaling = teachers as we know them, and that many parents won’t have the engagement, competence, and resources to make that system work as intended. But I’ve been wrong before.
“Charter” Schools (primary & secondary) most of which are still encumbered with the curricula/schedule of the respective educational systems (mainly due to fiscal issues).
There’s a lot more going on. E.g., most states have laws saying something like, “Students must be enrolled for at least 180 days comprising at least 990 hours of instructional time.”
And what Jay said.
Thar seems to refer to the “schedule” aspects of the existing systems.
A good chunk of LA’s lost students have gone to charters, which is absurd. The charter schools are in many cases paying into the same pension system–something like 85% of them. Los Angeles the city, as well as the feds, are paying to educate the same number of students with *more* teachers than they would need if there were no charters. And because more teachers are needed, we have a teacher shortage, which is driving up the pay.
All charters do is allow some people to choose private school–restricted by religion, language, intelligence, whatever–for free. Meanwhile, the state and the feds are going to be on the hook for more money in pensions, in teacher salaries, for school operations.
It’s insane. Meanwhile, all of you market fanatics think that charters are proving that public schools need competition, when all you are doing is giving away a good that costs $30k a year in the private realm for free, while you, the taxpayers, are STILL paying for pensions, teacher tenure, and all the other advantages of government employment you deluded yourself into thinking would end.
Realist:
Realism may not be actualism, as has been noted in literature.
“Charter” schools may be only one demonstration of efforts to escape the politically dominated oligarchies of entrenched (institutionalized) “systems” that no longer function as the facilities that societies (communities) generated to respond to particular commonly desired ends.
Los Angeles may indeed be “LaLa” land in this regard. Still, the signs are growing of public dissatisfactions with, and determinations to discard, what has become the “educational process” that has displaced facilities as primarily for learning, in order to support and maintain the “system” (and its internal and external relationships) for its operations.
You keep on using quote marks. They do not mean what you think they mean. And your comment is exhibit A in the delusionary thinking I was referring to.
It is regrettable to learn that one’s phrasings, intended to recognize differences in views, should create the very offense to others’ emotions sought to be avoided.
So, on the existing (and probably passing) systems of educational processing:
“The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world . . . ”
Tennyson
Perhaps it’s my location in the upper right hand corner of the country but I don’t see “growing .. public dissatisfactions with, and determinations to discard” the presently existing school systems.
Even though they haven’t lived up to their promises.
Charters shouldn’t have to pay into the pension system. That is the absurdity. Defined benefit pensions are an abomination. Switching to defined contribution and declaring the current system bankrupt will happen, it is only a matter of how much deeper into this hole fools signing up for promised rights to others’ future income want to dig.