Laura, you hit the public education nail right on the head!

From John Curry, November 22, 2011

http://www.ohio.com/editorial/the-debt-we-owe-to-public-education-1.246699

The debt we owe to public education

By Laura Ofobike
Beacon Journal chief editorial writer
November 21, 2011

A couple of weeks after Election Day, the giddiness — or the dyspepsia, depending on which side of the Issue 2 fault line you lined up — likely is fading. Behind us, I hope, are the raw emotions, the overblown rhetoric and ads. But still staring us in the face are some stark facts we need to absorb, both as individuals and as communities, if we are serious in Ohio about maintaining a public school system that can carry the weight of the future.

The majority of new school levies on the Nov. 8 ballot failed. That hardly passes as news anymore. A floundering economy has left masses of shell-shocked taxpayers who appear to be in no mood to vote for new property taxes for schools.

But that is not all the reason local schools have been coming up short so many times on financial support. In many districts, the percentage of residents who have children in the public school system is very low. (About 20 percent of Akron residents have children enrolled in the Akron Public Schools, for instance.) The declining number is not simply because private and charter schools and home-schoolers are drawing away households that otherwise would be part of the public system. Without question, state legislative policies in recent years certainly make that a factor. More important, though, is that current demographic trends are not always on the side of schools. Add a graying population to the fact that younger people are having fewer children, and you have a situation where fewer households have a direct and immediate interest in issues relating to schools.

Economists tell us we are fairly rational beings who make pocketbook decisions on the basis of how much we expect to benefit, sooner or later, from a transaction. In other words, we calculate how much of our assets to put on the line, how much skin to put in the game, based on what we expect to gain in return. In that sense, we play a pocketbook-versus-expectations game in which, unfortunately, levies for public education are coming out at the short end much too frequently.

[Read entire article here.]