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By Samuel Friedman | Watchdog Opinion
Delaware’s public school district officials have a time-honored slogan: “Just Do It Again.” This refers to the tradition of losing tax-increase referendums at the ballot box, and then trying them again a few weeks later with the same tax-increase intention but with a different pitch. This reminds me of their other slogan, “Second Time’s the Charm.”
Last Tuesday, the Christina and Red Clay school districts held separate referendums asking local property owners if they would agree to pay higher property taxes in order to provide additional funds for the school districts. Voters in Red Clay said yes while voters in Christina said no.
Barely two days after losing the referendum, Christina announced a hiring freeze and cut travel for district personnel as well as overtime pay and extra paid positions for certain staff.
They also announced a March 10 district meeting to consider calling for another referendum to raise taxes.
This strategy works: Voters vote against tax increases. Districts respond by making guilt-inducing decision like teacher layoffs or cuts to extracurricular activities. Then, when the second vote in weeks comes up, those who came out against the referendums either don’t realize a second referendum was called, or the guilt of saying no the first time pushes them to say yes the second time. Appoquinimink and Colonial school districts did this in 2013 and they succeeded. Milford lost a referendum last year and scheduled another one for this May.
The problem is not that Delaware taxpayers pay for public schools; our state constitution requires the General Assembly to “provide for the establishment and maintenance of a general and efficient system of free public schools”, which means tax dollars are constitutionally mandated to be used for education. The real question is how the state and our 19 school districts, with the combined student population of Montgomery County, Maryland, spend our money.
Transparency is notoriously lacking; each year roughly $350,000 per classroom of 25 students is unaccounted for in public spending.
Delaware has the 4th highest number of administrators to the number of students in the country. We are consistently in the top 10 states in spending per pupil, but we are 50th in the country in SAT scores just ahead of Washington, D.C., and even among “high testing states” with more than 70 percent student participation, we only beat out D.C. in student achievement. One out of every five children is educated outside the public school system, the highest rate in the nation. A child who started first grade in a public school this year is more likely to drop out of high school than earn a bachelor’s degree.
There is no doubt Delaware’s public schools are not serving the students as well as they are supposed to, but we don’t get calls for real reform the way states such as Florida, Vermont, and Arizona have implemented. Instead we have new “visions” whose dates change when the original “vision” year is reached with no improvements, more “investment” in S.T.E.M. education with no straightforward goal to make sure our “investments” succeed, and more directives from both the General Assembly and executive branch to “do something”– except, of course, reduce the size and power of the education bureaucracy.
Data from Dr. Bartley Danielsen, Associate Professor of Finance and Real Estate at North Carolina State University, published a study with IRS tax data showing a massive exodus of families from New Castle County to Pennsylvania once the families have children entering kindergarten. Can you blame them?
Wilmington is one of the most dangerous small cities in America with the highest crime rate for cities with populations under 75,000 and was the feature of a Newsweek piece in December 2014 called “Murder Town U.S.A.” I can attest to Wilmington’s crime problems in certain areas having driven and walked through different parts of the city at both day and night, weekend and weekday. There are plenty of reasons for this problem but one major underlying problem cannot be ignored: an education system that doesn’t perform and fails to produce productive members of society, leaving them to be educated on the streets.
Some people will note that the city has four school districts, who mainly serve students outside the city, and I agree not having a school district specifically serving inner-city families is part of the problem; Wilmington ought to have its own school district. But unless substantial changes are made to our education system, more temporary “investment” in our cities or new school buildings won’t improve the education prospects for many young Delawareans.