Public School Funding

These are two recent articles on The Advocate’s website.

School Board to ask judge what money it can use to fund Baton Rouge charter schools

State aid for vouchers lagging, and things could get worse, Louisiana education chief says

And it brought up some interesting facts that I didn’t realize, and I’m sure others didn’t either. These facts incentivized me to look a little deeper.

We have frozen spending on public education 9 of the past 10 years and we plan on freezing it again this coming year.

We are paying an additional 39 million a year on the voucher program and it goes up next year to around 45 million. And apparently the program isn’t working any better than the public schools.

Charter schools are funded by local school districts. For example, EBR is paying 56 million dollars a year to charter schools. Charter school ratings from the State. show that even if the school has an F rating it is meeting expectations. Once again we are draining funds from public schools to fund something that apparently isn’t working.

Then we are taking away funds and resources from public schools to operate state run schools. RSDs are failing as well.

I commend the State for trying to fix education, but if none of this working why don’t we quit funding all these programs and try something else? It just seems like we are dismantling public education in poorer areas of the state and not getting any results. It also seems like once we start something here we never evaluate it later down the line and decide if it’s worth it or not.

These programs have proven to be failures in that they are no better than the public school system, yet they get preferential treatment. No one is taking funding from them like they are from the public schools. In fact, they keep increasing the number of these programs even though they don’t work