Education Quagmire

As expected, the Seattle Schools Levies seem to be passing by a comfortable margin. This afternoon I sent one of the Seattle School Board members a courteous e-mail explaining how the School District alienated my support in the last few weeks (listing reasons I gave here). I concluded:

I expect both of today's levies to pass. I also expect that I will support other levies in the future. My opposition this time is simply intended as a message to the School District's leadership that it has room for improvement in a few areas, such as priorities and financial transparency.

The Board member replied:

It's a lot of words but it still comes down to punish the kids for the sins of the adults. I'm not impressed.

The message being, apparently, that voters are supposed to tolerate an unlimited amount of waste, dishonesty and incompetence and keep approving tax increases with only the hope that the funds will somehow benefit children.

And, hey, I always thought it was an elected official's job to impress the voters, and not the other way around!

Meanwhile in the State Legislature

The Democrats are trying to make it even easier for the zero-accountability government monopoly schools to exploit the taxpayers by lowering the threshhold needed to pass a levy. (Only about 22% of Seattle's registered voters voted in favor of the last levy. Is this an unacceptably high bar?) Fortunately, the Senate is in the hands of Republicans who understand the concepts of accountability and fiscal responsibility and don't want to make it easy for school insiders to victimize the taxpayers.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at February 04, 2004 07:00 AM